Former Nintendo gameplay counselor Erich Blattner recently fielded questions about his six-year tenure at the company, and while he doesn’t give up any scandalous reveals or decades-old secrets, he does share a few interesting stories like this misunderstanding:

My lead pulls me into a conference room to talk to me, he was obviously very uncomfortable and didn’t even want to make eye contact with me. He sat me down and said, “I don’t know what all this is about really. I just want to read you this letter, and you can respond.”

I don’t recall the exact words, but the letter he read me said something to the effect of “I work in the correspondence department. During the holiday rush I overheard a [Gameplay Counselor] say to a customer over the phone ‘I used to smoke pot and nobody bothered me’.”

I looked at my lead Rick and said: “Rick. Destiny of an Emperor”. He got red faced and crinkled up the letter immediately and said, “Well, I’m glad that clears this up. We’ll just forget it ever happened.”

… There was a game out at the time called Destiny of an Emperor that was a tile-based RPG game. There was a gate outside one of the cities where the player had to essentially enter a code to get in, i.e. push up, right, left, down or something to that effect.

In order to practice the code, I was telling somebody to go to a field and use an item called a “smoke pot” and practice the code to see that their army was moving in the right direction. The smoke pot item prevented random battles from being triggered while they did this.

Rick instantly knew what the situation was when I told him the game and the matter was dropped. That asshole in correspondence almost got me fired because they didn’t have any clue what I was talking about. For years at parties people would hear the story and say, “Ah, you’re that guy.”

I also liked this bit about helping a blind gamer:

Once I got a call from a blind guy who was able to play games if the sound was good enough, he could play Zelda because the sword made a sound effect every time it hit something. He essentially used it like a walking cane. … [He] asked questions about what the sound effects in certain games were like. With good audio feedback he was able to play games like Zelda.

tags / gameplay counselor / nintendo power / erich blattner / destiny of an emperor / capcom / ec