Former Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser talks about being annoyed when Switch 1 wasn’t included in console wars conversations
Posted on November 6, 2026 by Brian(@NE_Brian)
in News, Switch
Doug Bowser, the previous president of Nintendo of America, has spoken about the console wars and how it would annoy him when the original Nintendo Switch wasn’t a part of the conversation.
Nintendo Switch is one of the most successful consoles of all time. Only the PlayStation 2 has sold more – and not by much.
Given how well Nintendo Switch was doing and how popular it was, Bowser recently said that he’d get annoyed when the system wasn’t brought up in certain conversations involving console wars. Instead, it was sometimes only about the PlayStation and Xbox.
Bowser told GamesBeat during a panel:
“It’s interesting. It’s funny. I’m a pretty competitive guy. There are times when I would read news reports talking about the console wars, and they’d only mention Sony and Microsoft. WTF? We’re selling 150 million units and we’re not even included in the conversation? But there are times like this where I’m glad we’re not included in the conversation. Nintendo really chose to play in its own ocean and not get dragged down by that.”
During the same talk, Bowser touched on the pre-launch jitters for Nintendo Switch as he wasn’t quite sure how consumers would react:
“I was lucky that most of my tenure in my last role, it was the Nintendo Switch era. For me, it was – starting with the very first moment I saw Switch and got my hands on it, just the excitement I had over something I thought was incredibly revolutionary. Obviously Nintendo has a history in both the handheld space and the console space, but to see both of those platforms come together in one, and understanding that then we could take all of our dev talent, all of our dev capability on the game side and put it into one device – for me, I just thought that was amazing. Things were going to be heading in the right direction.
But there was the unknown. How was the consumer going to react? Everyone was talking about teraflops. At the time we weren’t quite talking about raytracing, but it came shortly after. This device didn’t have some of those capabilities. I was concerned as to how consumers would react. But this all came to life for me when we had our first launch event. We were unveiling in January. People got to play the games. I always said, it’s less about what’s under the hood and more about what’s on the screen. What’s the feeling you get when you see a game, get your hands on a controller, and experience the game firsthand? That’s what makes the difference.
I saw that come to life then, and of course I saw it come to life with the launch itself. Standing in front of our New York store and seeing consumers literally around the block and down past Rockefeller Center and beyond, lining up to get a Switch. And then seeing literal tears in their eyes as they came through the door, their sheer excitement and fandom for what we were about to do. That’s a pretty special moment. It’s one you don’t get to live very often.”
Along with everything above, Bowser revealed today that he initially said “hell no” to taking the job at Nintendo.
