Nintendo fire employee for blog interview

Localization writer Chris Pranger agreed to be interviewed by Chain Gang Media's Part-Time Gamers blog for episode 76. It gained popularity on Nintendo blogs. Some criticized him for doing it. Then Nintendo found out... and fired him.

Here's the episode:

http://www.chaingangmedia.com/ptg76/

What are your thoughts? Was he wrong? Were Nintendo harsh? What did Nintendo object to him saying in particular? Or was it just that he did it without permission?

http://kotaku.com/nintendo-fires-em..._source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

 

My thought was: who pays 100K for an English degree?

 

Hopefully he goes on more podcasts now and talks more about Nintendo. They don't own him anymore.

 

Likely signed NDA and broke it.

 

This perfectly shows in what state the PR department of Nintendo is.

 

He was fired most likely as a breach of contract, I have heard you need permission from Nintendo to interview employees (they have a old school business model) a lot of companies do this, can't have the wrong thing slip in the heat of conversation..
If he now goes and blabs too blogs, Nintendo may have every right to sue, he would have signed a NDA when he began employment and will probably have to wait 7 years before he can talk..

 

On the one hand, yeah he probably had an NDA (otherwise we'd be hearing about his lawsuit), on the other hand, it really shows the disconnect that Nintendo has with the fanbase. I know a lot of other companies aren't super willing to show how the sausage is made, so to speak, but Nintendo is just so backwards on a lot of things with their fanbase. It's not just this, there's the creator program (again, legally technically in the right, but terrible PR), the slapdash Virtual Console implementation (fun fact: you can now play more N64 games on an Xbox One then on a Wii U, because Rare put all the games they could from it on Rare Replay), pretty much everything outside of making games. They're one of the few companies that still makes amazing games on the regular, but they really need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

 

At least the WiiU Virtual Console has actually seen releases, and usually good titles at that. The 3DS' VC has been a fucking ghost town since February (and even then, the last games were the Donkey Kong Land games, but they didn't even go the extra mile and release the color version of DKL3), and most of the 3DS VC titles are kinda crap.

I've put up with crap with Nintendo for so long. I even defend them (to a degree) concerning their YouTube partnership program, but I think they're just making increasingly stupid decisions, that in turn make their "traditional" values increasingly apparent, and it's just getting difficult to stand by them.

It's already been annoying for me with their sponsorship dealings turning competitive Smash Bros into complete nonsense. Basically, Nintendo needs to more or less do what it's been doing with games, but do literally everything else different.

 

If your contract states that you can't talk publicly about your job, don't go on a podcast and talk candidly and openly at length about your job. Talking about how Xenogears had such low sales predictions that the localisation was an act of charity? Come on, man.

Fella should've known better. No doubt it was an honest mistake with no ill intentions, but it doesn't surprise me that they're now making an example out of him. You can be damn sure that nobody else working for Nintendo is going to be giving any unauthorised podcast interviews any time soon.

 

Yeah, I did more reading, and though I still feel that firing is too far, the guy did fuck up big time. In addition to his Xenogears comments, his comments about Masahiro Sakurai and Smash Bros weren't the smartest things to say either.

 

Well just when I'm willing to give Nintendo another chance............they fuck it up.

 

If I went on social media and started talking about the company I work for in that way I would expect my P45 too, just the way it is at big companies (and some not so big ones).

 

I found this to be a strange complaint on Kotaku originally; seeing it again is equally bizarre.

Three of those games Rare put on Rare Replay are just ports of the Xbox360 Live Arcade titles (Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Perfect Dark). And even then, how many great titles do people remember playing on the N64? I mean, from what I can recall, you were either playing Rare games or 1st party Nintendo games (or maybe Mischief Makers or Turok) on that system. Nintendo can't exactly put Rare's titles out on the VC, so...

I mean, I guess at the end of the day you can say there are maybe 8-13 more titles Nintendo could put on there that make sense. But to mock Nintendo for having less N64 games than the Xbox One after Rare, a company whose brightest moment was on the N64, puts out a collection of their best games is just silly.

I don't think there is a company out there that wouldn't have done the same thing.

 

Just because you are under NDA doesn't mean you can't speak... it is just that if you do you need to be aware of what exactly you are allowed to say.

 

But there's a lot of games they could certainly have added. Mario Kart 64 and Super Smash Bros are two of the best selling N64 games, but neither is available on the Wii U in the US (Nintendo wants me to instead take my Wiimote, use it to navigate the Wii menu, and hope I have a Classic Controller because I used my Gamecube controllers for all the Wii VC games). Some other games I think Nintendo should be able to release include:

• 1080 Snowboarding
• Star Fox 64
• F Zero X
• Literally any of the Pokemon games
• Wave Race 64
• Mario Party 1-3
• Majora's Mask
• Yoshi's Story

And that's not even counting pulling third parties into the mix (which they've done with NES and SNES games, as well as third party consoles like the Genesis and Turbo). That could bring in games like Beetle Adventure Racing and Extreme G.

 

If you are under an NDA as a localization writer for Nintendo, then chances are good that you can't say anything. Nintendo in particular doesn't like its employees talking to the press (many companies don't).

 

I think it's completely fair that the guy got fired, keeping an NDA is easy. And seeing it was a conscious act of the guy (you don't just accidentally be in a podcast and be there to talk about the company), either he didn't know what he was signing up for when signing a NDA, which is doubtful, or knew it was wrong and hoped no one notices'.

 

If I ever gave a public interview about my company, I'd probably also be punished. He's a dope.

 

Nintendo are still selling Zelda MM and Star Fox in their remade 3DS versions though, unlikely they would put the original out to undercut themselves. Similar with Pokemon and Mario Kart, Nintendo want people paying for the new iteration and not the old one, they are two of their most important franchises.

I wish they would port F-Zero GX to the 3DS though, I think my eyes would explode.