The Castle Now Has the Right Boss

Reggie Fils-Aimé spent fifteen years as president of Nintendo of America and achieved the near-impossible: becoming a genuinely beloved corporate executive. The "Regginator" showed up at E3 with actual enthusiasm, gave interviews that felt like conversations rather than investor communications, and stood on stage at the 2018 Game Awards alongside Microsoft’s Phil Spencer and Sony’s Shawn Layden to make a speech about cross-platform community that the internet replayed for weeks. He was, in the language of his industry, a character. A real one.

Now he’s leaving—to travel, to spend time with his family, to do whatever it is that former Nintendo presidents do when they’re no longer announcing release dates to packed rooms. His announcement came via a video message on Twitter, and he delivered the succession news in the most perfectly calibrated sentence possible: I’m handing the controller to Doug Bowser. The internet, predictably, lost its mind. Because Doug Bowser is Nintendo’s new president, and his name is Bowser, and if you’ve spent any time with a Nintendo product in the last forty years you understand immediately why this is extraordinary.

Reggie framed it well: With a name like Bowser, who better to hold the keys to the Nintendo castle? Bowser had been the company’s head of sales and marketing—a lifer, a known quantity internally, presumably capable of all the things the job requires. None of that is the point. The point is the name. The memes arrived within minutes. The image of a giant spiked turtle in a Nintendo lanyard spread immediately. Reggie earned a send-off worthy of fifteen years. Bowser arrived pre-memed. Both feel exactly right.