Ever wanted to work for Nintendo? With a little bit of pluck (and a lotta luck), these are five jobs any sucker off the street could do at Nintendo Australia. Now all you’ve gotta do is get your foot in the door.

1. Helpline operator
Being a helpline operator – one of the phone monkeys that answers calls to the 1900 helpline – is pretty much the mecca of jobs at Nintendo Australia for any respectable geek. The job is exactly how you’d imagine it: sitting by a phone, waiting for a desperate gamer to call, then helping them. So, all those lonely nights you’ve spent blasting your way through every game ever released will finally come in handy, eh?

Well, yes and no – while first hand experience definitely helps you relate to the hyperactive five year olds that call relentless, you don’t need to be a veritable gaming encyclopaedia to work on the helpline. All operators have access to an internal database of walkthroughs and cheats for pretty much every Nintendo game in existence, because when you’re charging $1.95 a minute – for help that any fool could find with a quick Google search – you’d want to make sure that the solution you’re spouting is actually correct.

You will still be forced to clock any AAA titles on company time before their release. It’s a tough job, etc.. Helpline operators get to do a whole bunch of other cool stuff too, like playing betas of upcoming titles to recommend classifications to the OFLC and helping assess whether games would be suitable for release in Australia.

Skills: A high tolerance to children you would ordinarily want to throttle.

2. Customer service operator
If the gameplay helpline’s not your thing, but talking down to people on the phone while maintaining an air of assisting them is, you could be better suited to the customer service department. Customer service operators are the first port of call for anyone with a gripe with Nintendo, whether it’s someone with a broken DS, a caller who threw their Wii remote through the TV, or yet another retailer bitching about not getting enough stock.

On the plus side, you’re more free to gab Nintendo ‘til the cows come home because people aren’t paying to talk to you, and the callers are generally more receptive to info about the company because they’ve got a problem and they want an explanation. That said, you wouldn’t want to be prone to getting jaded: you’ll hear about every single problem that people have with the company. Repeatedly. Plus you’ll have to be the one to tell little Timmy that he’ll have to pay to get his DS fixed because dirt – or worse, urine corrosion – isn’t covered under warranty.

Skills: A healthy disposition to talking too much, and the ability to spin white lies.

3. Repairer
If you’re the type of kid who spent ages toying with those Dick Smith circuitry boards, then you could find yourself gainfully employed in Nintendo Australia’s repair department. Every Game Boy that’s been dragged through mud or GameCube that’s been pissed on by a cat in Australia ends up at the repair department.

Besides the obvious – something comes in broken, you fix it and send it back – the repairers have a few other tasks that would make geeks salivate. There’s the testing station, a wall of consoles playing themselves uninterrupted to see if a reported problem can be duplicated by leaving it running. And there’s a huge stockpile of old gear just begging to be broken so you can “study” the effects.

Skills: Handy with a soldering iron. Even handier with puke removal.

4. Warehouse packer
Who said you had to aim high to work for your favourite game company? Arguably the most important function of Nintendo Australia is their warehouse and distribution operations – receiving in the shipments of consoles and games from Nintendo’s overseas manufacturers, and sending orders out to stores. And those boxes ain’t gonna pack themselves, so there’s plenty of work going if you’re willing to stand at a conveyor belt putting orders together.

Your job could be done by robots in a few years time, but gosh golly you’re part of the magic – even if it is hard to feel it when you’re in surrounded by cardboard boxes in a freezing warehouse that’s all but disconnected from the rest of the company (and the building).

The good news is there’s plenty of work going – but the bad news is that you’ll be facing stiff competition from non-English speaking migrants who’ll work for peanuts.

Skills: Putting stuff in box-ability.

5. Work experience kid
If you’re a high school student, you’ve no doubt had to face the depressing thought of having to go to your Dad’s crappy workplace for a week to learn the ins and outs of his mediocre job for your compulsory work experience. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way – all it takes is a little planning and a lotta sucking up.

Nintendo Australia runs one of the comprehensive work experience programs around. Over a week, keen-eyed students are shuffled between all of Nintendo’s departments, touring through marketing, customer service, sales, and to the giddying heights of their accounts receivable area – you’ll do it all. Obviously, though, if Nintendo gave every student who asked a week’s work experience, the company would do little else but – so, get in early (we’re talking a year or more early here) and send letter to the head office asking if you could be part of their work experience program – and suck up like you’ve never sucked before.

Skills: Letter-writing, and an ability to feign interest in accounts receiving.