Shigeru Miyamoto, born November 16, 1952 is a Japanese video game designer. He created the Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Pikmin and Nintendogs franchises for Nintendo game consoles, and mostly works on games as a producer. He has also supervised many games published by Nintendo on behalf of other developers, including Metroid Prime and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
Miyamoto is a world-renowned game designer, and has been called the "father of modern video games" and "the Walt Disney of electronic gaming". Video games designed by him typically feature refined control-mechanics, intuitive gameplay, simple storylines and imaginative worlds in which the players are encouraged to discover things by themselves.
Employed by Nintendo as an artist in 1977, he was given the task of working on one of their first coin-operated arcade games. The resulting title was Radar Scope, which was not as successful in the United States as Nintendo had hoped. Miyamoto later reused the game's hardware and modified it into Donkey Kong, which was a huge success as well as a turning point in video game history. The game's lead character, Mario (then called Jumpman), became an easily recognizable video game character and Nintendo's mascot. Miyamoto quickly became Nintendo's star producer, designing many franchises for the company, most of which are still active.
Although a game designer, he spends little time playing games. In his spare time, Miyamoto plays the guitar and banjo. Shigeru Miyamoto has two children with his wife, Yasuko Miyamoto, who was general manager of Nintendo of Japan in 1977. Neither of their children has expressed a desire to go into the family business. He claims that Yasuko does not like video games, but she is beginning to enjoy playing games like Brain Age and using the Wii's Everybody Votes Channel. His son, Kenshi Miyamoto, has allegedly expressed a desire to become a pro surfer rather than a professional gamer. Miyamoto has a Shetland Sheepdog named Pikku (pronounced Pick) that was the inspiration for Nintendogs. Miyamoto is described as being a semi-professional dog breeder.
In 1977, having completed a degree in industrial design, Miyamoto arranged a meeting with his father's friend Hiroshi Yamauchi, head of Nintendo of Japan. Yamauchi hired Miyamoto as a "staff artist" and assigned him to the planning department.
In 1980, the fairly new Nintendo of America was looking for a hit to establish itself as a player in the growing arcade market. After successful location tests using prototypes, then-NoA CEO Minoru Arakawa ordered a very large number of units of the arcade game Radar Scope. However, by the time the arcade machines could be produced and shipped to the U.S., interest had evaporated, and the game flopped. To stay afloat and clear the costly inventory of Radar Scope, Nintendo of America desperately needed a smash-hit game that the unsold machines could be converted to play. Yamauchi assigned Miyamoto the task of creating the required game.
Miyamoto consulted with some of the company's engineers, composed the music on a small electronic keyboard, and created Donkey Kong. When the game was complete, the chips containing the new program were rushed to the U.S. and Nintendo employees worked around the clock converting the Radar Scope machines. It was fortunate that Nintendo had so many units on hand, because Donkey Kong was an overnight success, and not only saved the company, but introduced a character who would be eternally identified with Nintendo.
The three famous characters Miyamoto created for the game were Donkey Kong, Jumpman, and Pauline. It was Jumpman, who would later be known as Mario, who has found the most success. Since his debut in Donkey Kong, he has appeared in more than 100 games spanning over a dozen gaming platforms.
Miyamoto is usually listed as "Producer" in the credits of Mario games. The few exceptions include the Super Mario Land series for the Game Boy, with which he had virtually no involvement (Gunpei Yokoi, Miyamoto's mentor, produced the Super Mario Land series). In The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, he was credited as "Miyahon", a mistranscription of the kanji in his name (±¾ ¡ª which can be read as either hon or moto). The misread surname was Miyamoto's development nickname in the 1980s (having a nickname was a common practice among Japanese game developers at the time).
At E3's convention in 1997, Miyamoto revealed that he was constantly working with around four hundred people on a dozen or so projects at a time.
Miyamoto has claimed his peers in the industry have been "too focused on hardcore gamers". His belief that his project could outsell PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is influenced by his business motto; "Games should be what we would want to play". However, he admits changes had to be made before the Wii was a serious contender. "There was a time when Nintendo was not influencing the world in the way it would have liked," Miyamoto claims, "That's why I've spent so much time trying to find new, exciting control systems we can use."
In the first six months of straight competition, Wii outsold both its rivals, Sony and Microsoft, with gamers buying more than twice as many Wiis as Xbox 360s and four times as many Wiis as PlayStation 3s. When asked about his vision of this rivalry in the future, he said, "My dream is that the Wii becomes this device everybody sees as being the natural thing next to the TV."