Reggie Fils-Aime

2004catchphraseclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Reggie Fils-Aime is the former president of Nintendo of America whose bombastic E3 stage lines turned him into an unlikely gaming celebrity starting in 2004. His declarations about kicking ass, taking names, and having a body that was ready spawned a decade-plus of catchphrases, fan edits, and the nickname 'The Regginator.'

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Overview

Reggie Fils-Aime is treated by gaming fans less as a corporate executive and more as a walking meme generator, thanks to a run of over-the-top lines delivered from the Nintendo E3 stage between 2004 and 20181. The two anchor quotes are his 2004 introduction, 'My name is Reggie. I'm about kickin' ass, I'm about takin' names, and we're about makin' games,' and his 2007 'My body is ready' line, both endlessly clipped, subtitled and remixed on YouTube2.

Fans coined nicknames like 'The Regginator' and 'The Reggielution' to describe both the persona and the perceived bump he gave Nintendo of America's public image3. The meme side of Reggie ranges from earnest hype edits set to metal soundtracks, to sarcastic image macros about his corporate non-answers, especially around the Mother/EarthBound series where fans spent years reading his vague replies as stonewalling a Western release of Mother 34.

Origin & Background

Platform
E3 press conference (broadcast) / YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2004

The meme starts at E3 2004 in Los Angeles, where the then Nintendo of America executive vice president opened Nintendo's press briefing with the now iconic 'My name is Reggie. I'm about kickin' ass, I'm about takin' names, and we're about makin' games' cold open, a moment Kotaku later credited with making him an 'instant gamer celebrity'1. Clips of the speech circulated on early YouTube, including the widely shared upload of the 2004 conference, cementing the line as a gaming shibboleth2.

The second catchphrase pillar arrived at E3 2007, when Reggie previewed Wii Fit by declaring 'My body is ready,' a phrase Nintendo itself later leaned into for its own promotional videos5. Reggie did not create these memes, he supplied the raw material; anonymous YouTube uploaders, forum posters and Facebook fan-page admins turned the quotes into a shared vocabulary3.

How It Spread

Through the late 2000s Reggie's stage moments became a recurring E3 tradition, with each new conference watched partly for whatever quotable he would drop next, from the 'Regginator' arm-flexing bits to the Wii Fit body-readiness line2. Fan sites, Facebook groups and Tumblr blogs collected clips, screenshots and reaction gifs, and the character became a fixture of Nintendo-focused meme pages3.

A sourer strand of the meme grew out of the Mother 3 localization saga. In a 2009 Wired interview, Reggie dodged Chris Kohler's direct question about Mother 3 with a classic non-answer about 'other priorities,' which EarthBound fan community EarthBound Central mocked as 'his patent mixture of politician talk and corporate talk'4. Angry Mother fans turned this into their own image-macro genre, casting Reggie as the smiling face of Nintendo's refusal to localize the game3.

The format got a bittersweet capstone in February 2019 when Nintendo announced Reggie's retirement effective April 15, 2019, with Kotaku's headline riffing that his 'body is no longer ready'1. Doug Bowser succeeded him, and Reggie himself leaned into the meme in his farewell video posted to Nintendo's Twitter account, addressing fans directly one last time6.

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