‘My body is ready’: How Reggie learned to speak Nintendo’s language of fun

polygon.com:

Reggie Fils-Aimé went out on top. The former president and chief operating officer of Nintendo of America retired after 16 years at Nintendo in 2019. He arrived at Nintendo when the GameCube was facing serious challenges from Microsoft and Sony, and left as the Nintendo Switch handheld/console hybrid was on its way to becoming the company’s best-selling console of all time.

Yet Fils-Aime seems ready to have a second act. His autobiography Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo, out May 3, is not a play-by-play of the game and console launches he presided over, but a detailed telling of his entire life through the lens of advice to others in business or leadership. It spans his childhood as the son of Haitian immigrants, born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island. It includes each of the steps in his career that shaped him, with stints at Procter & Gamble, Pizza Hut, Panda Express, VH1, and others, as well as the more impactful moments from his time at Nintendo.

Polygon caught up with Fils-Aimé a few weeks ago to talk about the book, highlights from his career, and who he hopes reads Disrupting the Game.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Polygon: There are probably a lot of people out there who wanted the behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Nintendo who might be disappointed by this book. There are some, but it’s not a tell-all. Who did you hope would read it?

Reggie Fils-Aimé: So, in writing the book, I recognized there’s this group of Nintendo fans that, for them, the perfect book would have been telling all of these stories about Nintendo products, and how we got there, and kind of bringing them into the room of all of these discussions and all of these activities. But for me,