Shigeru Miyamoto

• 1. The Boy Who Found a Cave

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  Shigeru Miyamoto was born on the 16th of November, 1952, in the small Japanese town of Sonobe, in Kyoto Prefecture. His parents were of modest means, and his father taught English. What turned a child from a quiet provincial town into the designer of franchises played by hundreds of millions of people begins not in a boardroom, but outdoors, in the hills and forests around his home.

  From an early age, Miyamoto explored the natural areas near his house. One day he discovered a cave. After days of hesitation, he finally went inside. That single act of curiosity, of choosing to enter an unknown space rather than turn back, planted something that would later become The Legend of Zelda. His expeditions through the Kyoto countryside gave him a direct, physical understanding of what it feels like to stumble upon something unexpected, to feel genuinely lost and then found.

  By the early 1970s, Miyamoto had graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with a degree in industrial design. He loved manga and initially hoped to become a professional manga artist. He was shaped by manga's kishōtenketsu narrative structure and by Western genre television. The 1978 arcade hit Space Invaders eventually drew him toward video games. The cave, the manga, the arcade machine, these three things converged in a career that no one, including Miyamoto himself, quite planned.

• 2. Donkey Kong's Unlikely Birth

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  Through a mutual friend, Miyamoto's father arranged an interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo. After Miyamoto showed Yamauchi some of his toy creations, Nintendo hired him in 1977 as an apprentice in the planning department. At the time, Nintendo was a relatively small Japanese company that had started in playing cards and novelties before branching into toys in the 1960s.

  Miyamoto's first significant contribution was helping create art for the coin-operated arcade game Sheriff. His real test came after the 1980 release Radar Scope. The game had achieved moderate success in Japan, but Nintendo's attempt to break it into North America had failed badly, leaving a large number of unsold units and the company on the verge of financial collapse. Yamauchi decided to convert those unsold Radar Scope units into a new arcade game. He gave the job to Miyamoto, who later said, self-deprecatingly, that "no one else was available." Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, supervised the project.

  Miyamoto imagined many characters and plot ideas before settling on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a woman. He had originally intended to mirror the rivalry between Bluto and Popeye for Olive Oyl, but Nintendo's attempt to license the Popeye property failed. The ape evolved from Bluto, a form Miyamoto described as "nothing too evil or repulsive." He also named Beauty and the Beast and the 1933 film King Kong as influences. Yokoi thought the original design was too complex; he suggested see-saws to catapult the hero, but that proved too difficult to program. Miyamoto settled instead on sloped platforms, ladders, and rolling barrels.

  When the finished game reached Nintendo of America, the sales manager disapproved of how different it was from the maze and shooter games then dominant in arcades. American staffers named the woman character Pauline, after Polly James, wife of Don James, the manager of Nintendo's Redmond, Washington, warehouse. The playable hero, originally called Jumpman, was renamed after Mario Segale, the warehouse landlord. In January 1983, the 1982 Arcade Awards gave Donkey Kong the Best Single-player Video Game award and a Certificate of Merit as runner-up for Coin-Op Game of the Year.

• 3. Mario Gets a Brother

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  After Donkey Kong's success, Miyamoto returned to the character and gave him a sibling. He named the new game Mario Bros., introducing Luigi as Mario's brother. Gunpei Yokoi convinced Miyamoto to give Mario some superhuman abilities, most notably the capacity to fall from any height unharmed. Mario's visual design in Donkey Kong, overalls, a hat, and a thick mustache, led Miyamoto to reshape the game's setting so that Mario looked like a plumber rather than a carpenter. Miyamoto felt New York City provided the right backdrop, with its "labyrinthine subterranean network of sewage pipes."

  Miyamoto also worked on the character sprites and game design for the Baseball, Tennis, and Golf games for the NES in this period. Games in the Mario Bros. franchise have since been released for more than a dozen platforms.

  For Super Mario Bros. 3, Miyamoto based Bowser's seven children, the Koopalings, on seven of his own programmers, as a tribute to their work on the game. The game took more than two years to complete. In a first for the Mario series, it introduced a two-screen system: an overworld map alongside a level playfield. The Koopalings' names were later changed in English localization to echo names of well-known Western musicians.

• 4. Zelda and the Miniature Garden

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  When Miyamoto described what he wanted The Legend of Zelda to be, he reached for the image of "a miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." He wanted players to feel that the world was genuinely theirs. This came directly from his boyhood in Kyoto, where he roamed fields, woods, and caves, and where he had once become lost among the sliding doors inside his family home. The game's labyrinthine dungeons recreated that memory.

  Miyamoto employed nonlinear gameplay in Zelda as a deliberate contrast to the linear structure of Super Mario Bros. The world was expansive and offered, as one description put it, "an array of choice and depth never seen before in a video game." He described the feeling he wanted to recreate: "When I was a child, 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." In February 1986, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda as the launch game for the Famicom Disk System peripheral.

  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 it was "ahead of its time by years if not decades." GameSpot featured it as one of the 15 most influential games ever made, crediting it with introducing battery backup saving and establishing the foundations of later action-adventure and role-playing games. Ocarina of Time, which Miyamoto produced for the Nintendo 64, was listed by Guinness World Records as the highest-rated video game in history, with a Metacritic score of 99 out of 100.

• 5. Making Games Feel Alive

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  In a 1992 interview, Miyamoto said plainly that "the important thing is that it feels good when you're playing it" and that "quality is not determined by the story, but by the controls, the sound, and the rhythm and pacing." He calls the feeling he wants players to have kyokan: he wants "the players to feel about the game what the developers felt themselves."

  Miyamoto and Nintendo do not use focus groups. He tests a game by playing it himself first. If he enjoys it, his working assumption is that others will too. He then tests with friends and family. He encourages younger developers to switch their dominant hand to their other hand to experience what it feels like to encounter a game as a newcomer would.

  He has been consistently critical of prerendered cutscenes, preferring real-time rendered cinematics that allow him to change the game right until it is finalized. He stated in 1999, "I will never make movie-like games." Ocarina of Time contains more than 90 total minutes of short cutscenes, all rendered in real time. His preference for small teams and a malleable process meant he could direct substantial changes to Ocarina of Time's overall scenario in the game's final months of development.

  Miyamoto has been periodically critical of the role-playing game genre. In 2003, he described his "fundamental dislike" of RPGs, arguing that their structure makes anyone able to succeed, while in Mario, "if you're not good at it, you may never get good." Despite this, he has praised specific elements of RPGs, including Yuji Horii's writing in Dragon Quest and Shigesato Itoi's dialogue in the Mother series. His philosophy is not to make something popular but to love it himself: "Not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love."

• 6. Beyond the Screen

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  Miyamoto's personal life runs at an angle to the industry he helped build. He spends little of his personal time playing video games, preferring guitar, mandolin, and banjo. He avidly enjoys bluegrass music. He is ambidextrous but favors his left hand, which is why both Mario and Link were designed as left-handed characters.

  His Shetland Sheepdog, named Pikku, provided the inspiration for Nintendogs. When Miyamoto unveiled Nintendogs at E3 2005, he appeared alongside Tina Wood and promised to show her "a few more tricks" backstage. He is also a semi-professional dog breeder. Gardening with his wife after starting his own family influenced other games he was developing at the time.

  Miyamoto reportedly carries a measuring tape everywhere, driven by a hobby of guessing the dimensions of objects and then checking whether he was right. In December 2016, he demonstrated this habit on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and performed the Super Mario Bros. theme on guitar with The Roots during the same appearance.

  In 1998, Miyamoto became the first person inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. In 2006, the French Minister of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2012, he became the first interactive creator to receive the Prince of Asturias Award in Spain, in the category of Communications and Humanities. In 2019, he received Japan's Person of Cultural Merit award, the first person in the video game industry to do so. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which he produced, grossed $1.347 billion worldwide during its theatrical run as of the 14th of July, 2023, making it the third-highest-grossing animated film of all time and the highest-grossing film based on a video game by a wide margin.