Dream Factory helps family power-up
Ten-year-old Shea Sparling meets head of Nintendo America
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This article was published 28/09/2015 (3969 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
One Crescentwood boy travelled far away for a magical adventure recently, and he didn’t need a warp whistle to do it.
Shea Sparling, 10, spent seven days in Seattle, Wash. with his family visiting Puget Sound, Pike Place Market and the Nintendo headquarters where he met the president of Nintendo America, Reggie Fils-Aimé.
“He’s one of the presidents of one of the many companies, of one of the biggest companies, and I love the company, because they make the game that I love: Pokémon,” Shea explained.
Shea, who is a huge fan of Pokémon (his favourite edition is Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby for Nintendo 3DS) and Nintendo’s catalogue which includes Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., lives with a condition called Polyarteritis Nodosa, a type of vasculitis which affects the walls of his capillaries, brain and kidneys.
“It’s an extremely rare disease, and it took years for them to figure it out, but what happened was he had a series of strokes starting when he was four,” Shea’s father Thom Sparling explained. “It seems to be, knock on wood, right now well-controlled. He’s on a course of substantial medications that seem to be keeping it in check.”
According to Sparling, Shea sees every “ologist” with the exception the audiologist regularly. Shea has been free of strokes for a year and a half but still spends many hours at the hospital to manage the disease.
The family was able to take a much-needed break and head to Seattle thanks to local charity The Dream Factory, which arranged the trip and set up the meeting with the head of Nintendo America.
When the family arrived at Nintendo America’s headquarters they were overwhelmed. Mario was there to welcome the family and Shea’s name was broadcast across half a dozen screens in the lobby.
“He’s one of the presidents of one of the many companies, of one of the biggest companies, and I love the company, because they make the game that I love: Pokémon.”
“This… is… awesome…” Shea recalled thinking as he walked into the building. “I’ve just loved the company since I was a younger kid.”
The family was given a tour of the facility, learned about the history of Nintendo, went for lunch on-site, met two of Nintendo’s top Pokémon developers, and then got to play Nintendo’s brand new Mario Kart game that hadn’t yet been released. The highlight was meeting Reggie Fils-Aimé who raced Shea in Mario Kart, allowed Shea to pick his brain, and then gave him some brand-new gear.
“When he walked in my brother asked a really good question, because everyone in the world wants to know, because they made a new system and aren’t saying much about it,” Shea said. “My brother asked what is special about it, and he said to stay tuned.”
“He didn’t give us any more information.”
The rest of the trip was spent touring Seattle, fishing for salmon off Puget Sound, and Shea’s favourite stop was visiting Pike Place Market to see fishmongers throw the day’s catch about.
“For The Dream Factory to put this together for us was really remarkable,” Sparling said. “We went and had seven days without hospitals, without anything, and the five of us, the family together — it really was a dream,” he said.