Inside the Nintendo E3 2012 conference with infamous Nintendo Land fireworks ending

Former Nintendo of America employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang have shared insight into the company’s notorious E3 2012 press conference which ended on the display of fireworks from Nintendo Land. The two reflected on what happened during a recent episode of their podcast.

Nintendo has had some amazing moments at E3, but some infamous ones as well. Some will probably never forget the Wii Music performance with DJ Ravi Drums in 2008 and things going wrong during Shigeru Miyamoto’s demo of Zelda: Skyward Sword in 2010. Unfortunately, another instance of things not exactly going well was the aforementioned Nintendo Land closer.

When the conference was happening, many who were watching were expecting Nintendo to end on something big. Instead though, brief in-game footage was shown of Nintendo Land that was literally fireworks, and nothing more.

According to Yang’s comments, it was always the plan to end on that game instead of a different title. However, a trailer for Nintendo Land was going to be shown instead. Yang indicated that the video “was a little bit lackluster”, and Nintendo was scrambling to think of a different ending. It seems that no one could come up with a good idea, and fireworks was settled on.

Ellis and Yang shared the following:

Ellis: I remember I came back because I needed to talk to somebody or get something, and I walked in at absolutely the worst time possible because everybody was in that room having the most tense conversation I had like ever seen. What had happened was – and this did happen all the time – they wanted to change up the presentation. They spend months planning these things, but once you get there and you start rehearsing, it’s like “oh, let’s move this around” or “let’s rewrite this script.’ But the idea here was, we need a new ending for this presentation. Do you remember what the original ending was?

Yang: The original ending was just to end on a trailer I believe of Nintendo Land. The trailer that was cut was a little bit lackluster, but it’s nobody’s fault – it’s just what it was. It was sort of just showing these little mini games, kind of have the Mario Party feel, but it didn’t feel like a press conference ending. It doesn’t feel like the Nintendo ‘oh, let me leave you with one more thing’, which is what I think they wanted to get to because it was another big hardware year for Nintendo, so it’s like ‘we need to have something, but we don’t got it. What can we cobble together?’ It was the night before. It was like 4 PM.

Ellis: … it was like, ‘what are we gonna do? We need to know now. We need to decide now, otherwise we’re going to be screwed.’ And I did the grandpa Simpsons meme where I just turned right back around. I didn’t need to be there.

Yang: That happens a lot – Mr. Iwata would look around the room and be like, ‘what do you think? Maybe you have an idea.’ But that’s good though that he used to do that. You don’t know where the good idea is going to come from. Nobody had it though. Nobody had a good idea, let me just tell you this right now. Because there was no good idea.

Ellis: But in the end, the great idea was this fireworks. It was literally fireworks.

Yang: The original ending was end on a trailer, and I think Reggie was going to be the last person that was on stage. But instead, they trotted our poor Mr. Eguchi who was leading up development for Nintendo Land. He also developed Animal Crossing. He was like an amazing developer – the sweetest, nicest person, but had to take the bullet.

Ellis: Also not the strongest presenter of that group I would say. He’s more quiet, mild mannered.

Yang: Very sweet, very mild mannered. He wasn’t expecting to go on stage to be honest. At the eleventh hour… this is literally like 4 PM, and the press conference was 9 AM the next day. You basically have to make the change, recut the videos, and then rehearse all night. The poor man was probably up until what ungodly hour trying to get this right.

Kit and Krysta reflected more on the Wii U in their podcast episode, which you can find here.