Vice President of Marketing · Nintendo of America · b. 1942 · 1986–2001
Peter Main served as Nintendo of America's Vice President of Marketing through its peak years, overseeing the campaigns that made Nintendo the dominant brand in American toy and entertainment retail from the NES launch through the Nintendo 64 era.
Main joined Nintendo of America in 1986, just as the NES was gaining commercial momentum, and assumed oversight of the marketing and sales organisation that would position Nintendo as the definitive American childhood entertainment brand of the late 1980s. His team's work — the Nintendo hotline (1-800-255-3700), the Nintendo Power magazine launch in 1988, the sweepstakes and promotional tie-ins that kept Nintendo visible year-round — built a direct relationship with young consumers that no competitor came close to matching. The Nintendo hotline alone handled over five million calls a year at its peak, and Nintendo Power reached around 1.5 million subscribers at its peak, making it the most widely circulated gaming publication in North America. Main represented Nintendo's retail face through the console wars with Sega, managing the company's response to Sega's aggressive comparative advertising and maintaining relationships with retailers who were being courted by Sega's equally aggressive trade marketing. He remained Nintendo of America's senior marketing executive through the launches of the SNES, the Nintendo 64, and the Game Boy Color, retiring in 2001 — a year before Arakawa's own departure.