[killface]

Prior to Reggie, NOA was just a distribution company. They handled orders and collected their middle-man fees. A vanishingly small percentage worked on actual games.

NOA started taking some cues from Microsoft, and started moving some technology competency into NOA. NCL (the japanese acronym for Nintendo of Japan), of course, saw this as a threat. Even 5 years ago, when I was last there, the entire office had a hidden resentment for the Japanese office. The US office had pulled off some amazing feats, and it resulted in most of the interesting technology projects being yanked back to Japan.