Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer and producer at Nintendo, widely regarded as the most influential figure in the history of his medium and the creator of the Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, and Pikmin franchises.⁵⁶ Often called the father of modern video games, he has been compared to Walt Disney for his command of play and wonder, and Time magazine dubbed him “The Spielberg of Video Games” in May 1996.²⁶ Games featuring the franchises he created have sold more than a billion copies worldwide.¹⁶

Miyamoto was born on 16 November 1952 in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains.¹⁵¹⁶ His parents were of modest means; the household had no television, and as a child he made his own toys out of wood and string, put on performances with homemade puppets, and made cartoon flip-books.¹¹⁵ He explored the bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through cedars and pines, and around the age of seven or eight discovered a hole in the ground that led, when he returned with a lantern, into a small cavern of branching passageways.¹² Miyamoto has told the cave story repeatedly to emphasize how his youthful explorations of the countryside outside Kyoto fed his enthusiasm for inventing and designing games.²⁸ His father was an English teacher who took the family to the city on weekends to watch Western films, especially Disney movies.¹⁶

He aspired to become a manga artist, founding a manga club in middle school and writing to mangaka such as Shotaro Ishinomori, and later joined a music club, learning guitar and banjo and taking up bluegrass, which he still plays.¹⁶ He enrolled at the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, taking five years to earn his industrial-design degree, which he received in 1975.¹⁵⁶ With no job lined up after graduation, he turned to his father, who arranged through a mutual friend an interview with Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi; Miyamoto was hired in 1977 as the company’s first staff artist after impressing Yamauchi with toys he had made.⁶¹⁵ His earliest work included designing arcade-cabinet housings and graphics and packaging for Nintendo’s products.¹⁸¹⁴

Donkey Kong and the Mario franchise

In 1981 Miyamoto created his first video game, the arcade title Donkey Kong, after Yamauchi assigned him to convert a stock of unsold cabinets from the commercial failure Radar Scope into a new game.⁶¹⁸ Approaching the project as an artist rather than an engineer, he designed the story first, basing it on the love triangle of Popeye—the hero, the brute Bluto, and Olive Oyl—but when Nintendo could not secure the license, Popeye became a carpenter, Olive Oyl his girlfriend, and Bluto a gorilla.¹⁴¹⁸ He chose the name “Donkey” to convey stubbornness and “Kong” for its association with King Kong.¹⁴¹⁹ The game introduced the platform genre, is credited with the first use of visual storytelling in a video game, and rescued Nintendo from the Radar Scope loss.¹⁸ It became a major arcade hit, with Nintendo selling some 4,000 cabinets a month by October 1981.¹⁸

The carpenter protagonist of Donkey Kong, later renamed Mario and reconceived as a plumber, became gaming’s first folk hero, a squat Italian who quests through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Princess Toadstool.² Miyamoto explained that Mario became a plumber in the follow-up Mario Bros. because that game was set among green sewer pipes.²³ In 1985 Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. as a title for its home console, the Famicom in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System abroad.⁶¹⁹ The side-scrolling action game, whose horizontally scrolling screen Miyamoto devised to expand the playing space, set the standard for home-console games and became the best-selling video game of all time until Wii Sports surpassed it.⁶²⁰¹ The Super Mario Bros. franchise has sold more than 240 million units, not counting Mario Kart, Mario Party, and other offshoots.¹

The Legend of Zelda and later work

The year after Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto created The Legend of Zelda, a non-linear game set in the imaginary world of Hyrule that let players venture in all directions and explore worlds within worlds.²⁰¹⁵ He drew its sense of exploration directly from the fields, woods, and caves he had roamed as a boy outside Kyoto, describing the intent as giving players “a miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer”.⁸¹⁵

During the Super Nintendo era Miyamoto helped create the Star Fox and F-Zero series and helped design the console’s controller with its left and right shoulder buttons.¹⁹⁵ With the Nintendo 64 he led the company’s transition to 3D, supervising Super Mario 64—a 1996 best-seller with open three-dimensional environments and camera controls that required redesigning the joystick—and directing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which pioneered enemy lock-on and context-sensitive controls and has been called the greatest video game ever made.⁶¹⁹²⁰ Later projects include Pikmin, Luigi’s Mansion, Star Fox 64, and Mario Kart 64.⁶ By the late 1990s he had worked on more than 80 Nintendo titles.⁶

Miyamoto’s design philosophy emphasizes fun over technical realism and the close interweaving of hardware and game ideas, an approach he developed alongside his mentor Gunpei Yokoi, the architect of the Game Boy.⁵²¹ He has stated that he intentionally avoids “100% real visuals,” using a representational, deformed-polygon style so that a creator’s individuality can come through, and that his ideal game is “an experience I’ve never had before”.²¹ Nintendo’s level designers have credited him with the four-part kishōtenketsu structure—introduction, development, twist, and conclusion, drawn from Chinese poetry and the comics he drew as a child—used to shape stages in Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World.¹¹¹²

He helped lead the team that developed the Wii.¹ Within Nintendo his business card long identified him as senior managing director and general manager of the Entertainment Analysis & Development Division.⁶ Following the death of president Satoru Iwata in July 2015, a reorganization on 16 September 2015 made Miyamoto a representative director with the new title of Creative Fellow.⁴¹⁰ By 2022 he had worked at the company for 45 years and had had a hand in most of its games and consoles, by then a more background presence overseeing whole projects, and was overseeing the forthcoming Mario film, The Super Mario Bros. Movie.⁵

In 1998 Miyamoto became the first inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.⁶¹³ In a 2009 poll of nine thousand video-game developers asked to name their “ultimate development hero,” he was the runaway winner; The Sims creator Will Wright, who placed third, observed that “most of the designers out there now grew up playing his games”.¹