Reggie Fils-Aimé claims Nintendo of America was ‘forced’ to launch Game Boy Micro

videogameschronicle.com:

Former Nintendo of America (NOA) president Reggie Fils-Aimé has claimed that the company’s US arm was “forced” to launch Game Boy Micro in 2005 due to a lack of alignment between different parts of the business.

Writing in his new book, ‘Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo’ (transcribed by VGC), Fils-Aimé said having to launch the GBA redesign after the launch of its successor, Nintendo DS, was a direct result of the “siloed thinking” that was holding the company back at the time.

Fils-Aimé was NOA’s executive vice president of sales and marketing in 2005. He said the firm’s US arm was “planning on closing out the [Game Boy Advance] line” that year with a Black Friday promotion that would clear its remaining inventory, as GBA was in “a state of decline” and NOA had switched its attention to making the recently launched Nintendo DS a success.

But in early 2005, shortly after NOA had made its plans for the big GBA sale, he became aware of Nintendo Japan’s plans to launch Game Boy Micro.

But because of the way Nintendo was structured, Fils-Aimé claimed that members of the company’s operations and product development teams with close ties to NCL in Japan “had been made aware of the Micro much earlier” than he had.

“From my perspective, the concept of Game Boy Micro was a nonstarter,” Fils-Aimé said in the book. “The hardware was exceptionally small, Not only were the control buttons difficult for any reasonably sized adult to manipulate, but also the screen was tiny. This ran counter to current consumer electronics trends of making screens larger.

“But development of this hardware had continued, and now we were forced to launch the system. ‘We should have talked about this long ago’, I told [fellow NOA