Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto was awarded Japan's Person of Cultural Merit in 2019 in recognition for his contributions towards Japan's video game industry. He was the first person in the video game industry to receive the honor.

Miyamoto served as an Executive Producer on the 2017 game Super Mario Odyssey, as opposed to serving as General Producer, and is credited as being a major influence on the game's development.

Miyamoto enjoys rearranging furniture in his house, even late at night. He also stated that he has a hobby of guessing the dimensions of objects, then checking to see if he was correct, and reportedly carries a measuring tape with him everywhere. In December 2016, Miyamoto showcased his hobby on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, while also performing the Super Mario Bros. theme on guitar with The Roots during the same show.

Following the death of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in July 2015, Miyamoto was appointed as an acting Representative Director, alongside Genyo Takeda. He was relieved of this position in September 2015 when Tatsumi Kimishima assumed the role of the company's president. He was also appointed the position of "Creative Fellow" at the same time, providing expert advice to Kimishima as a "support network" alongside Takeda.

Using what he had learned about the Nintendo 64 from developing Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64, Miyamoto produced his next game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, leading a team of several directors. Its engine was based on that of Super Mario 64 but was so heavily modified as to be a somewhat different engine. Individual parts of Ocarina of Time were handled by multiple directors—a new strategy for Nintendo EAD. However, when things progressed slower than expected, Miyamoto returned to the development team with a more central role assisted in public by interpreter Bill Trinen. The team was new to 3D games, but assistant director Makoto Miyanaga recalls a sense of "passion for creating something new and unprecedented". Miyamoto went on to produce a sequel to Ocarina of Time, known as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. By reusing the game engine and graphics from Ocarina of Time, a smaller team required only 18 months to finish Majora's Mask.

Miyamoto, and Nintendo as a whole, do not use focus groups. Instead, Miyamoto figures out if a game is fun for himself. He says that if he enjoys it, others will too. He elaborates, citing the conception of the Pokémon series as an example, "And that's the point – Not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It's the very core feeling we should have in making games." Miyamoto wants players to experience kyokan; he wants "the players to feel about the game what the developers felt themselves."

In a survey of game developers by industry publication Develop, 30% of the developers, by far the largest portion, chose Miyamoto as their "Ultimate Development Hero". Miyamoto has been interviewed by companies and organizations such as CNN's Talk Asia. He was made a Fellow of BAFTA at the British Academy Video Games Awards on March 19, 2010. In 2012, Miyamoto was also the first interactive creator to be awarded the highest recognition in Spain, the Prince of Asturias Award, in the category of Communications and Humanities.

Miyamoto has a wife, Yasuko, and two children. In 2010, his son was 25 and working at an advertising agency, while his daughter was 23 and studying zoology at the time. His children played video games in their youth, but he also made them go outside. Although he knows some English, he is not fluent and prefers to speak in Japanese for interviews.

GameSpot featured The Legend of Zelda as one of the 15 most influential games of all time, for being an early example of open world, nonlinear gameplay, and for its introduction of battery backup saving, laying the foundations for later action-adventure games like Metroid and role-playing video games like Final Fantasy, while influencing most modern games in general. In 2009, Game Informer called The Legend of Zelda "no less than the greatest game of all time" on their list of "The Top 200 Games of All Time", saying that it was "ahead of its time by years if not decades".

The original game in The Legend of Zelda series was the fifth best-selling game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Wind Waker was the fourth best-selling game for the GameCube. Twilight Princess experienced commercial success. In the PAL region, which covers most of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Western Europe, Twilight Princess is the best-selling Zelda game ever. During its first week, the game was sold with three out of every four Wii purchases. The game had sold 4.52 million copies on the Wii as of March 1, 2008, and 1.32 million on the GameCube as of March 31, 2007.

Miyamoto produced three major Mario titles for Wii from 2007 to 2010: Super Mario Galaxy, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Super Mario Galaxy 2.

On November 28, 2006, Miyamoto was featured in TIME Asia's "60 Years of Asian Heroes". He was later chosen as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the Year in both 2007 and also in 2008, in which he topped the list with a total vote of 1,766,424. At the Game Developers Choice Awards, on March 7, 2007, Miyamoto received the Lifetime Achievement Award "for a career that spans the creation of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong to the company's recent revolutionary systems, Nintendo DS and Wii." GameTrailers and IGN placed Miyamoto first on their lists for the "Top Ten Game Creators" and the "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time" respectively.

At E3 2004, Miyamoto unveiled The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, appearing dressed as the protagonist Link with a sword and shield. Also released for the GameCube, the game was among the Wii's launch titles and the first in the Zelda series to implement motion controls. He also helped with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which featured more accurate motion controls. He also produced two Zelda titles for the Nintendo DS, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. These were the first titles in the series to implement touch screen controls.

In 2003, he described his "fundamental dislike" of the role-playing game (RPG) genre: "I think that with an RPG you are completely bound hand and foot, and can't move. But gradually you become able to move your hands and legs... you become slightly untied. And in the end, you feel powerful. So what you get out of an RPG is a feeling of happiness. But I don't think they're something that's fundamentally fun to play. With a game like that, anyone can become really good at it. With Mario though, if you're not good at it, you may never get good."

Miyamoto's Mario series is, by far, the best-selling video game franchise of all time, selling over 400 million units. Super Mario Bros. is the second best-selling video game of all time. Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario Bros. 2 were, respectively, the three best-selling games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Levi Buchanan of IGN considered Super Mario Bros. 3' s appearance in the film The Wizard as a show-stealing element, and referred to the movie as a "90-minute commercial" for the game. Super Mario World was the best-selling game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Super Mario 64 was the best-selling Nintendo 64 game, and as of May 21, 2003, the game had sold eleven million copies. At the end of 2007, Guinness World Records reported sales of 11.8 million copies. As of September 25, 2007, it was the seventh best-selling video game in the United States with six million copies sold. By June 2007, Super Mario 64 had become the second most popular title on Wii's Virtual Console, behind Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Sunshine was the third best-selling video game for the GameCube.

Miyamoto produced various games for the GameCube, including the launch title Luigi's Mansion. The game was first revealed at Nintendo Space World 2000 as a technical demo designed to show off the graphical capabilities of the GameCube. Miyamoto made an original short demo of the game concepts, and Nintendo decided to turn it into a full game. Luigi's Mansion was later shown at E3 2001 with the GameCube console. Miyamoto continued to make additional Mario spinoffs in these years. He also produced the 3D game series Metroid Prime, after the original designer Yokoi, a friend and mentor of Miyamoto's, died. In this time he developed Pikmin and its sequel Pikmin 2, based on his experiences gardening. He also worked on new games for the Star Fox, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, and The Legend of Zelda series on both the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance systems. With the help of Hideo Kojima, he guided the developers of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. He helped with many games on the Nintendo DS, including the remake of Super Mario 64, titled Super Mario 64 DS, and the new game Nintendogs, a new franchise based on his own experiences with dogs.

His use of real-time rendered cinematics (not prerendered video) serves both his own rapidly interactive development process with no rendering delays, and the player's interaction with the game's continuity. He prefers to change his games right until they are finalized, and to make "something unique and unprecedented". He prefers the game to be interactively fun rather than have elaborate film sequences, stating in 1999, "I will never make movie-like games"; therefore, the more than 90 total minutes of short cutscenes interspersed throughout Ocarina of Time deliver more interactive cinematic qualities. His vision mandates a rapid and malleable development process with small teams, as when he directed substantial changes to the overall game scenario in the final months of the development of Ocarina of Time. He said, "The reason behind using such a simple process, as I am sure you have all experienced in the workshop, is that there is a total limit on team energy. There is a limit to the work a team can do, and there is a limit to my own energy. We opted not to use that limited time and energy on pre-rendered images for use in cinema scenes, but rather on tests on other inter-active elements and polishing up the game".

Miyamoto's games have also sold very well, becoming some of the best-selling games on Nintendo consoles and of all time. As of 1999, his games had sold 250 million units and grossed billions of dollars.

In 1998, Miyamoto was honored as the first person inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. In 2006, Miyamoto was made a Chevalier (knight) of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.

Calling him one of the few "video-game auteurs," The New Yorker credited Miyamoto's role in creating the franchises that drove console sales, as well as designing the consoles themselves. They described Miyamoto as Nintendo's "guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face," noting that Nintendo might not exist without him. The Daily Telegraph similarly attributed Nintendo's success to Miyamoto more than any other person. Next Generation listed him in their "75 Most Important People in the Games Industry of 1995", elaborating that, "He's the most successful game developer in history. He has a unique and brilliant mind as well as an unparalleled grasp of what gamers want to play."

A 1995 article in Maximum stated that "in gaming circles Miyamoto's name carries far more weight than Steven Spielberg's could ever sustain."

In both games, Miyamoto decided to focus more on gameplay than on high scores, unlike many games of the time. Super Mario Bros. largely took a linear approach, with the player traversing the stage by running, jumping, and dodging or defeating enemies. By contrast, Miyamoto employed nonlinear gameplay in The Legend of Zelda, forcing the player to think their way through riddles and puzzles. The world was expansive and seemingly endless, offering "an array of choice and depth never seen before in a video game." With The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto sought to make an in-game world that players would identify with, a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." He drew his inspiration from his experiences as a boy around Kyoto, where he explored nearby fields, woods, and caves; each Zelda title embodies this sense of exploration. "When I was a child," Miyamoto said, "I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this." He recreated his memories of becoming lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family home in Zelda' s labyrinthine dungeons. In February 1986, Nintendo released the game as the launch title for the Nintendo Entertainment System's new Disk System peripheral.

Donkey Kong was a success, leading Miyamoto to work on sequels Donkey Kong Jr. in 1982 and Donkey Kong 3 in 1983. In his next game, he reworked the Donkey Kong character Jumpman into Mario, and gave him a brother: Luigi. He named the new game Mario Bros. Yokoi convinced Miyamoto to give Mario some superhuman abilities, namely the ability to fall from any height unharmed. Mario's appearance in Donkey Kong—overalls, a hat, and a thick mustache—led Miyamoto to change aspects of the game to make Mario look like a plumber rather than a carpenter. Miyamoto felt that New York City provided the best setting for the game, with its "labyrinthine subterranean network of sewage pipes". The two-player mode and other aspects of gameplay were partially inspired by an earlier video game entitled Joust. To date, games in the Mario Bros. franchise have been released for more than a dozen platforms. Shortly after, Miyamoto also worked the character sprites and game design for the Baseball, Tennis, and Golf games on the NES.

Miyamoto went on to become the company's first artist. He helped create the art for the company's first original coin-operated arcade video game, Sheriff. He first helped the company develop a game with the 1980 release Radar Scope. The game achieved moderate success in Japan, but by 1981, Nintendo's efforts to break it into the North American video game market had failed, leaving the company with a large number of unsold units and on the verge of financial collapse. In an effort to keep the company afloat, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to convert unsold Radar Scope units into a new arcade game. He tasked Miyamoto with the conversion, about which Miyamoto has said self-deprecatingly that "no one else was available" to do the work. Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, supervised the project.

Miyamoto graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with a degree in industrial design but no job lined up. He also had a love for manga and initially hoped to become a professional manga artist before considering a career in video games. He was influenced by manga's classical kishōtenketsu narrative structure, as well as Western genre television shows. The title that inspired him to enter the video game industry was the 1978 arcade hit Space Invaders.

Born in Sonobe, Japan, he graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts. He would originally try to have a career in being a manga artist, until eventually being interested in video games and, with the help of his father, would join Nintendo in 1977 when he impressed then president Hiroshi Yamauchi with his toys. He would then become its first artist and help to create art for the arcade game Sheriff, and would later be tasked with creating a new arcade unit for the company. This would eventually become Donkey Kong.

He would eventually go on to create both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, which became massive successes for the NES and would cement its place in the 80's and help public perception of games. Since then, his games have been flagships of every Nintendo video game console, with his earliest work appearing on arcade machines in the late 1970s. He managed Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development software division, which developed many of the company's first-party titles. As a result of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's death in July 2015, Miyamoto fulfilled the role of acting president alongside Genyo Takeda until being formally appointed as the company's "Creative Fellow" a few months later.

Nintendo, a relatively small Japanese company, had traditionally sold playing cards and other novelties, although it had started to branch out into toys and games in the mid-1960s. Through a mutual friend, Miyamoto's father arranged an interview with Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. After showing some of his toy creations, Miyamoto was hired in 1977 as an apprentice in the planning department.

Shigeru Miyamoto (Japanese: 宮本 茂 , Hepburn: Miyamoto Shigeru, pronounced [mijamoto ɕiɡeɾɯ] ; born November 16, 1952) is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors. He is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda.

Miyamoto was born in the Japanese town of Sonobe, a rural town northwest of Kyoto, on November 16, 1952. His parents were of "modest means", and his father taught the English language.

Miyamoto imagined many characters and plot concepts, but eventually settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a girl. He meant to mirror the rivalry between comic characters Bluto and Popeye for the woman Olive Oyl, although Nintendo's original intentions to gain rights to Popeye failed. Bluto evolved into an ape, a form Miyamoto claimed was "nothing too evil or repulsive". This ape would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy." Miyamoto also named "Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Donkey Kong marked the first time that the formulation of a video game's storyline preceded the actual programming, rather than simply being appended as an afterthought. Miyamoto had high hopes for his new project, but lacked the technical skills to program it himself; instead, he conceived the game's concepts, then consulted technicians on whether they were possible. He wanted to make the characters different sizes, move in different manners, and react in various ways. However, Yokoi viewed Miyamoto's original design as too complex. Yokoi suggested using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen; however, this proved too difficult to program. Miyamoto next thought of using sloped platforms and ladders for travel, with barrels for obstacles. When he asked that the game have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was essentially asking them to make the game repeat, but the team eventually successfully programmed the game. When the game was sent to Nintendo of America for testing, the sales manager disapproved of its vast differentiation from the maze and shooter games common at the time. When American staffers began naming the characters, they settled on "Pauline" for the woman, after Polly James, wife of Nintendo's Redmond, Washington, warehouse manager, Don James. The playable character, initially "Jumpman", was eventually named for Mario Segale, the warehouse landlord. These character names were printed on the American cabinet art and used in promotional materials. The staff also pushed for an English name, and thus it received the title Donkey Kong.