Nintendo PR rep Laurent Fischer recently made a rather backhanded comment about gamers, claiming that only "geeks" and "otaku" were interested in more storage space for the Wii. In the meantime, we’ve all been sitting back waiting for the inevitable backlash, and it seems as though God of War creator David Jaffe will fire the opening salvo.

In a post on his personal blog, Jaffe took some heavy shots at Nintendo, accusing them of selling out for mainstream success and forgetting who got them to where they are. His statements follow; be warned that there is quite a bit of strong language:

"This statement, especially coming from a marketing person, reeks of one of two things:

A - Arrogance at a level that should make Nintendo – if this statement reflects the core of the company – very ashamed.

B - A marketing person who has no real clue about games and thinks she’s being cute and coy by dissing the ’geeks’ ’cause she thinks the mainstream loves them now... if this is the case, she really needs someone to sit her down and explain to her which side her fucking toast has been buttered on for years and will eventually get back to being buttered on."

Jaffe went on to state that the comments were "really, really sad. And not so much because Nintendo seems to be telling a chunk of its loyal fanbase to go fuck itself, but because it’s [sic] just reeks of junior high school vibe immaturity bullshit."

It’s bad enough if anyone at Nintendo harbors the sort of feelings toward their fanbase that Fischer vocalized, but for a PR person to make a public statement as such is really a huge gaffe. No doubt Nintendo will issue an apology soon, but I don’t think that’s going to be enough. As you can see by Jaffe’s comments, this has really touched a nerve in the gaming community, and a simple "We’re sorry" isn’t likely to make it go away. Here’s an idea: Nintendo, you release a hard drive for the Wii that only "geeks" and "otaku" are allowed to buy, and we’ll just forget this whole thing ever happened.