Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [85]
Miyamoto had worked closely with Koizumi on many Zelda and Link games, and knew and trusted the younger man’s vision. Miyamoto had reached the management stage where so long as he knew the project was successful, he’d let developers follow their muse without too much interference. He let Koizumi sneak story elements into the Zelda games, for instance. But Miyamoto had always come back as director for the Super Mario franchise. For Super Mario Sunshine, though, he handed the baton to Koizumi. Miyamoto would still produce, but he had been making Mario adventures for twenty-two years. It was time for a successor. This retirement possibly prompted an industry rumor that Miyamoto had died of a heart attack.
Nintendo publicized Super Mario Sunshine by cooking a Guinness World Record-winning 3,265 pounds of spaghetti in San Francisco’s Little Italy, dubbed “Pasta a la Mario.” Prizes were hidden in it, and six fans dressed as Mario dove in Double Dare – style to find them. The game sold 5.5 million copies, beaten only by Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart (both sold seven million copies) in Gamecube popularity. But the hit games from Xbox and PS2—Halo, the Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy franchises—all outsold Gamecube’s best. All three Grand Theft Auto PS2 games outsold Mario as well, a sign of the times.
The year 2002 was a transition for Hiroshi Yamauchi as well. For more than a decade he had been hinting at retirement, and had considered various different leaders to take over his business. The natural choice would be Minoru Arakawa, Nintendo of America’s president—he was family, he was Japanese, he had strong American ties, no one knew the business better than him. And the seventy-three-year-old billionaire had once had his eye on the son-in-law, true.
But Arakawa and Yamauchi had had a strained couple of years. Yamauchi, whose top showing as Japan’s richest man on the yearly Forbes billionaire list was no longer a lock, refused to visit his daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids in Seattle—or even meet them halfway in their shared Hawaii home. Arakawa wasn’t grooming himself to be the attack dog Nintendo would need to survive, Yamauchi felt. In one infamous moment, Arakawa had fallen asleep in front of clients, almost dooming a partnership. Yamauchi’s zori were too big to be filled by just any feet.
Since the early nineties, Yamauchi took glee in saying that whomever he picked as successor, it would not be his son-in-law. Arakawa, perhaps saving face, began stating that Yamauchi was the only good choice for Nintendo president, and publicly agreed with Pop’s decision to look elsewhere. In fact, in early 2002 Arakawa announced his retirement from Nintendo of America at age fifty-five, beating the old man to the punch.
Banker Tatsumi Kimishima, who had been hired to run the Pokémon division as CFO and then president, was promoted to Nintendo of America’s president. He was the sort of mature, buttoned-down person who seemed to have been born an old man, and he was now running Nintendo’s biggest division. Perhaps, though, a money man was too conservative a choice.
Four years later, Kimishima would be replaced by the boisterous Reggie Fils-Aime (pronounced Fee-a-me), who opened a press conference by claiming, “I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin’ games.” Fils-Aime, quickly nicknamed the Regginator, was not only American but black. Nintendo of America’s leadership went from Grandpa Ojiisan to Will Smith. Fils-Aime’s broad features and goofy, energetic manner made him seem like a character escaped from one of Nintendo’s own games.
But who could sit behind Yamuachi’s desk in Kyoto? It couldn’t be anyone new to the industry, since he’d just feel that Nintendo needed to get some