Howard Phillips

He was an adolescent video game fanatic through the golden age of arcade video games, about age 13 with the advent of Pong (1971) and entering his twenties at the time of the Atari 2600 home console (1977) and the Space Invaders (1978) arcade game.

He would later summarize his favorite thing about video games: "Play. Simple play. And the ability to share play with others either cooperatively, competitively, or just sharing game experiences, such as tips, news and rumors."

He graduated from the University of Washington and continued living in the Seattle area.

He was a trade painter, including boats.

He had some experience in restaurant management.

Phillips was in between jobs when he saw a Nintendo job listing in The Seattle Times that read: "Have Fun And Play Games for a Living".

Phillips didn't apply for the job, instead being invited by former college friend and current Nintendo employee of one month, Don James.

Howard Phillips is an American video game consultant and producer best known as an early employee of and spokesman for Nintendo of America in the 1980s.

Initially a boat painter, Phillips started his video game career as manager of Nintendo of America's first Tukwila warehouse in 1981.

This began his video game career in 1981 at age 22 as the fifth employee of Nintendo of America by managing its first warehouse in Tukwila, Washington.

Already an avid gamer, as manager of the 60,000 foot warehouse he eagerly took a privileged first look at each new product from Nintendo's headquarters in Japan, in a receiving and testing process which he considered "a little bit like Christmas".

He recalled, "I really love games of all types so every day was really fun."

These first arcade games include Sky Skipper (1981), Popeye (1982), Donkey Kong Jr. (1982), Mario Bros. (1983), Donkey Kong 3 (1984), Punch-Out!! (1984), VS. System (1984), and the smash hit Donkey Kong (1981).

He was personally involved in receiving from Japan and delivering to American arcades the 60,000 cabinet machines (4,000 per month) of Donkey Kong alone that made the first fortune of Nintendo of America, totaling $180 million in the game's first year.

At age 24, he was "the largest volume shipping manager for the entire Port of Seattle, having over 100 40' shipping containers full of games arrive every day and needing to be shipped out by late in the night."

Running the warehouse hand truck like a competitively timed game to unload 11,000 pounds of 44 arcade cabinets in 9.5 minutes, he then reloaded, delivered, and repaired machines in the field, such as "behind the hotdog machine at the 7-Eleven".

He managed the test sites of each arcade launch, so along the way, he took the liberty of gathering owner feedback and observing the gameplay of audiences, especially children.

He said, "I took it as a chance to watch kids play and see what they liked and didn't like so I could pass that information on to Mr. Arakawa. I would also give them pointers on how to improve."

He was regularly and candidly consulted by Nintendo of America's cofounderssalespeople Ron Judy and Al Stone, and president Minoru Arakawa, all of whom rarely played video gamesabout the players' preferences about Nintendo's and competitors' games, and the daily cash intake from each Nintendo game.

At his warehouse, Phillips excitedly discovered the Japanese import of Nintendo's new arcade-capable Famicom home video game console in mid-1983.

His avid gameplay skills, intuition, and market research made him a primary advisor to the Japan-based Shigeru Miyamoto and company, on how to approach and develop the nascent American market which was suffering the disastrous 1983 video game crash.

He managed relations with the retail sites of the 1985 test launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, gaining insight into which games were popular.

Because of his gameplay aptitude and formative experience in Nintendo's then-nascent expansion in North America, his roles grew to spokesperson, manager of the Game Counselor hotline, and co-editor of Nintendo Power magazine.

Phillips was instrumental throughout the 1985—1986 launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

As part of the 12-person "Nintendo SWAT team" who moved to New York City in late 1985, he worked "every waking hour ... at the crack of dawn ... seven days a week".

He chose the game library for the NES's launch, gave live product demonstrations, interacted with thousands of players, set up retail store displays designed by Don James and Gail Tilden, and managed relations with the retail test launch sites.

He wrote the elaborate script that demonstrators would read while articulating the centerpiece R.O.B. toy robot which was key to the NES launch success.

With this cumulative knowledge, with his deep expertise in the entire Nintendo video game library, and being aged between the target child and their parents, he became a core liaison between the Japanese developers at Nintendo Co., Ltd. and the American video game player market for the rest of his tenure.

Phillips was known as the Game Master He said, "I was so immersed in Nintendo's games, and those of our competitors, that I literally knew more about them than anyone else" so he helped establish and manage the Game Counselor toll-free telephone number, where callers could ask Nintendo employees for help with gameplay.

In late 1987, he and marketer Gail Tilden consolidated and expanded this expensive practice into mass media form by creating the free-of-charge Nintendo Fun Club of which he was the President, and whose members received the complimentary Nintendo Fun Club News.

The modest but energetic newsletter achieved 600,000 subscribers, and its seventh and final issue is dated July 1988.

The Nintendo Fun Club and the Nintendo Fun Club News were canceled in favor of the much more expansive Nintendo Power magazine, with the first issue in August 1988.

Phillips was co-editor and gameplay fact checker.

Because the Nintendo of America subsidiary was such a small company, where "everybody does everything" and "everybody worked together", Phillips was still the warehouse manager even with all these additional roles and regular flights to Japan.

Nintendo Power features the Howard and Nester comic strip series which caricaturizes his real self in cartoon form, opposite an archetypal fictional boy who symbolizes all the Nintendo playing children of the world, and gave Phillips a direct voice to audience's homes.

Phillips grew to become an industry personality, a lifestyle spokesperson, and advocate for the American gaming community.

After leaving Nintendo in 1991, his video game work included Microsoft, Chair Entertainment, and GameDuell.

Howard Phillips was raised to make his own fun, saying "we weren't poor, but back then parents didn't bury kids in toys ... so we were constantly making things to play with, on, in, or around."

With industrious use of neighborhood scrap materials, he made and remade forts and treehouses.

He made an electromechanical "arcade game made from clock motors and an old world globe".