Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto: What we owe the world’s most influential game designer
The legendary designer behind Super Mario, Zelda and many other Nintendo classics understood how technological innovation and sharp ideas could work together. At 70, he’s lost none of his sense of fun
Nintendo’s designer Shigeru Miyamoto – one of gaming’s earliest superstar creatives, and the mind behind Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda F-Zero and many, many other wonderfully inventive games – has turned 70. Miyamoto, who has had a hand in the development of most Nintendo games and consoles, is the most influential game designer alive. Nintendo is part of the creative marrow of the games industry: there is barely a game developer today who has not played, and been influenced by, Miyamoto.
He has worked at Nintendo for 45 years and, since the 1990s, he has been the face of the company. Alongside the late, great former president Satoru Iwata, and the genius hardware designer and Game Boy architect Gunpei Yokoi, he laid the foundations for the company’s enduring success, and helped established its fun-first approach to video games. His smiling, familiar presence at events such as E3 and Tokyo Game Show over the decades – where he has always been happy to appear on-stage, waving around a Master Sword or a Wii Remote – has made him a beloved figure among the Nintendo faithful. He used to show up at midnight launches to sign things for fans; a friend of mine once asked him to draw a Mario doodle on his GameCube at a meet-and-greet, and he cheerfully obliged. He just seems like a really nice dude.
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