Howard Phillips

Image of Howard Phillips.

Howard Phillips is the creator and former writer of Nintendo Fun Club News and Nintendo Power. In the early nineties, Phillips quit Nintendo of America and joined several companies such as LucasArts, THQ and Microsoft before starting his own business (Howard Phillips Consulting) and becoming the studio director of Chair Entertainment Group, a game developer based in Utah.

Biography

In his twenties, Howard Phillips was a boat painter who was hired at Nintendo of America to work in a warehouse. He would eventually climb up to become a game evaluator (referred to as the "Game Master" by Nintendo), testing Japanese developed Nintendo games for their quality and assisting in the game localization process.

Phillips with the founders of Rare at the launch of Solar Jetman.

While at Nintendo of America, Phillips created Nintendo Fun Club News. At the beginning of each issue (there were only seven) was a column he wrote called "prez says" in which he gave a short introduction. After the seventh issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News, Phillips and his team worked on rebooting the bi-monthly newsletter into a full blown magazine titled Nintendo Power. Nintendo Power, which became a monthly magazine several months after its debut, also featured a column written by Phillips at the end of each issue which he devoted to thanking the readers and explaining the process of creating the issue. In Nintendo Power V2, he explained how Nintendo Power gave him and his team the opportunity to go to Disney Land in California and meet game development all-stars (such as the creators of Rare).

Howard Phillips became a sort of celebrity to Nintendo Power readers. He would regularly pose with Nintendo products within the pages of the magazine and would appear with his trademark bow tie and clean cut look (the former of which was noted by Nintendo Power competitor Electronic Gaming Monthly, who labeled Phillips the "bow tie monster"). A fictional version of Phillips even starred in a monthly comic in Nintendo Power called Howard & Nester. It was eventually discontinued, but is considered one of the hallmarks of the magazine's early years. Today Nester is remembered more than Howard due to his more comedic role in addition to appearing in several video games either as an important character (Nester's Funky Bowling) or as a cameo (StarTropics).