Best of ND 2013: Top Ten: Nintendo Blunders

6. Nintendo Press Conference: E3 2008

You knew this one was coming. In fact, it ties into the previous entry. Where do I start with this one? The Nintendo 2008 E3 press conference was an abomination. Nintendo came out to celebrate mediocrity with a press conference surrounded around things that most people watching E3 don’t care about. The killer apps of the conference were Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit, and the notorious presentation of Wii Music. We also got to see Cammie Dunaway demo the Shaun White snowboarding game and make incredibly forced jokes and awkward remarks to her co-hosts. On the hardware side, Nintendo showed us the new peripheral Wii Motion Plus, which had features the Wii should have had from the very start. Oh, and Nintendo assured us that Mario and Zelda games were coming. But that’s stuff that we probably didn’t need to see. We would rather see this:

I remember watching this press conference when it aired live. For a while I had been struggling to defend Nintendo, and I said that it cared about its fanbase. I said that Nintendo would still make great games, and not just cater to the new audiences of moms and grandparents it had gained with Wii. When I saw this press conference, I felt hurt and cheated, and I struggled with my feelings about Nintendo. This is perhaps why the E3 2008 presentation was such a blunder, because it was an embodiment of what everyone was afraid that Nintendo would become. The one good thing to come out of this conference was Reggie’s “my body is ready” remark. Luckily, Nintendo turned its game around, and every E3 since has been much better.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11