Oh No He Didn't (Oh Yes He Did)

The man in the photo here is a guy named Laurent Fischer. He's not remarkably unlike you or me. But when he puts his foot in his mouth, he manages to jam it as far in as he can.

You see, Fischer is the director of marketing for Nintendo's European division. And, as a director of marketing, he really ought to know better than to do what he did last week.

Nintendo users have been clamoring for more memory for the Wii -- an external hard drive would be awfully nice, especially as games take up more space. But, in a story for Edge, a gaming magazine, the editor's asked Fischer about the demand for more space:

As is always the case with Nintendo’s press events nowadays, the dirty word ‘casual’ was raised at its WiiWare preview, only to be dismissed in favor of a distinction between gamers and non-gamers. Playing these semantic games is fine, but when a pertinent question about the limited Wii system memory was raised, Laurent Fischer, managing director of marketing at NOE, easily slipped into talking about how “geeks and otaku” were the only people who would want this issue addressed.

Otaku, if you're not hip to the Japanese language, is a slang term that characterizes gamers as pimply, fat guys who spend all their time playing videogames in the basement of their parents' house. It's like inferring that Ninjasistah eats only watermelon and fried chicken. It's not a very nice word.

The story was posted on the Next Generation gaming website on Wednesday and the blogosphere has had a field day with Fischer's comment. On his blog, God of War creator David Jaffe said, "Ok, so if this is true, it's really, really sad. And not so much because Nintendo seems to be telling a chunk of its loyal fanbase to go fuck itself, but because it's just reeks of junior high school vibe immaturity bullshit."

In the meantime, Fischer has retracted his comment, with the following missive on the Videogaming247 website:

"I have huge respect for those who, like me, share a common passion for Nintendo and want to make it clear that I would never use and I didn't use this terminology in such a context or way to cause offence. I regret that this misunderstanding has created such offence and disappointment within the community."

Oh, I see. He was using the word "otaku" in the nicest way.

The upside of the whole thing? The geeks and otaku apparently are the winners, according to Wired:

Immediately following Fischer's statement, geeks and otaku around the world turned on their Wiis to find that the on-board storage had been magically quadrupled through the power of apology.