Nintendo - Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario and Others)

Shigeru Miyamoto

Born November 16th, 1952 in Sonobe, Japan, Shigeru Miyamoto never had a television as a child, and thus had to rely on his own imagination to keep him occupied. He would spend his days exploring outside his home, trekking through rice fields and canyons, until one day he discovered a large hole in the ground. Upon inspection it turned out to be the entrance to a cave. With a lantern in hand, the young Shigeru ventured inside. It was breathtaking discoveries like that Miyamoto drew inspiration from and put to use in his later work.

Working years

In 1970, he began attending the Kanazawa Munici College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, about which he’s often remarked this his studies often took second place to his doodling. His antics, however, stretched his college experience out to much longer than it should have been. Nevertheless, he graduated five years later with a degree in industrial design.

Shigeru was cautious about choosing a career, as he didn’t want to get stuck doing something that he didn’t enjoy. He needed an outlet. A way to express his inner creativity in a way that would keep his attention and keep him from getting bored. Fortunately for him, his father was good friends with Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of a toy company. A toy company named Nintendo.

Miyamoto, in his mid-20s, went to the company and was asked to bring in some toy ideas. After seeing what he had to offer, he was given a job as a staff artist, which Nintendo didn’t even need at the time.

Video Games

In 1980, Nintendo decided that they wanted to take a run at the growing video game market. They mass-produced an arcade game called Radar Scope. By the time the units arrived in the US the interest in video games had almost completely faded, resulting in Radar Scope being a horrible flop. Having nowhere else to turn, Yamauchi went to Shigeru. Shigeru had loved video games back in college and was very eager to work on one. He than pitched a concept idea to Yamauchi, who loved it. That concept came to be known as Donkey Kong.

As it turned out, the mass-production of the Radar Scope machines came in handy. Nintendo employees worked around the clock to convert those machines to Donkey Kong machines. It was an overnight success that helped forever cement Nintendo’s role in the video game market.

Arcade games were simply a jumping off point for Miyamoto, who went on to revolutionize the way that we look at video game consoles. He was behind the original Super Mario Bros. game that made the Nintendo Entertainment System the must-have console of the 80s. The game also created the platforming genre and spawned countless sequels and hundreds of spin-offs.

Shigeru Miyamoto Today

Miyamoto is still with Nintendo and still finding ways to improve the video game experience. He’s said to be a very humble man, riding his bike to work and only accepting an average pay rate, despite being partially responsible for turning Nintendo into a multi-million dollar company.

Shigeru recently received a star on the Walk of Game, a section of the Metreon in San Francisco that is meant to resemble the Hollywood Walk of Fame and honors outstanding achievements in the video game industry.

Quotes

• "A game that keeps a smile on the player's face is a wonderful thing. Nintendo's theme for 2006 will be 'Create new fun.' Spread the fun of games to everyone. To do this, we must return to the beginning, to recapture the essence that made people who enjoy games even now enjoy them in the first place." (Source:Famitsu)