Shigeru Miyamoto Nintendo's abiding design genius
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This text was taken from an article, "Game Designer Profile: Shigeru Miyamoto." This article was part of a larger article, "The Making of Super Mario 3," which was published in Nintendo Power for the Jan/Feb 1990 issue, coinciding, (incidentally) with the launch of Super Mario 3 for the NES. Thanks to Next Generation, we have some relatively high profile game designers. David Perry, Sid Meier, and Mark Cerny come to mind, as does John Romero. But Miyamoto is, a bit of mystery, given his status as the preeminent game designer. We don't see as much on him, so I thought I'd do my bit to raise his image by resurrecting a nine year old article and riding some unaccredited writer's work. Oh jeez, I'm rambling again. Here's the article.
Game Designer Profile: Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto, or "Dr." Miyamoto as he’s known to his fans, has been involved in the video game industry since 1977, when he started working at Nintendo Company Ltd. designing characters and art work for arcade games. The first game he actually directed design and artwork on was Donkey Kong in 1980. As everyone knows this was the big hit that brought Nintendo into world prominence- quite a good first outing. Since then, Miyamoto has had a hand in just about every hit game from Nintendo. He is in charge of directing the development of the Super Mario Bros. series, and he also worked on design and development of the Zelda series.
A typical working day for Mr. Miyamoto starts at a flexible time in the morning and sometimes lasts until the wee hours of the morning. During a typical day he will check on the six or seven software projects for which he is supervising the development. He also spends a lot of time traveling around and meeting people in other creative fields to get inspiration for game ideas.
Among Miyamoto’s current projects are planning games for the Super Famicom (like Super Mario Bros. 4 and Zelda 3). He is also working with Shigesato ltoi, another famous Japanese copywriter on a role-playing game set in modern times that will probably be available for the NES next year.
Miyamoto enjoys his job and says he has always wanted to design games. He has a B.A. in Industrial Design from Kanazawa Municipal College of Arts and Crafts. He makes his home in Kyoto with his wife and two children, a son age 4 and daughter age 2. When he’s not busy designing games, he likes to listen to music and play bluegrass. He also collects musical instruments, and owns two guitars, a banjo and a mandolin among others.
As the designer of so many popular games, Miyamoto has gained quite a bit of fame in Japan, although you wouldn’t know it from him. "I’m not all that famous, but people do write and ask me for photos for their kids," he says modestly.
When asked for his advice to aspiring game designers, Mr. Miyamoto had these words of wisdom: "It’s one thing to design games based on established characters, but the key to success in designing games is to try and create your own interesting and original game play ideas. Keeping in touch with other areas of popular culture will help you come up with more innovative ideas. Also, understanding assembly language inside and out is essential for game programming."
Miyamoto has visited the United States three times, and says he has seen a lot of originality in this country, especially in the area of music. In 1987, he and his team toured Disneyworld, San Francisco and New York City in search of inspiration. On his next trip, he told us he’d like to visit Nashville. (We can only wonder what kind of games that trip would inspire)
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