Shigeru Miyamoto is the creator of Nintendo's most legendary video game series. He chats with us on everything from how he got started in the biz to the ideas behind his most popular games.

The Nintendo Team

There were actually about three or four designers before me (at Nintendo), but I was the first person to enter as an industrial designer.

Within Nintendo is the idea that you are just a member of a team. I still believe I am a member of a team and the directors and assistants I’ve worked with over the years who are now coming to the forefront and working on their own games also really value the input and the strength of working as a team.

You know I think really success isn’t something that comes just from your own efforts. There are a lot of other factors that influence that; there are a lot of variables in the world, you know be they social variables or political variables. It takes a lot of luck for things to line up properly to have really great success and I think we all understand that.

At Nintendo my team now is upwards of 200 people or more and actually among those are a number of people who I’ve worked with for ten, fifteen, twenty years who we’ve worked together this whole time and remained very loyal to each other and I think that’s a very, very important part of our team.

The Birth of a Game

The way that I make games is that I’ll start by creating motion on the TV screen and see if I can make something fun out of that or creating a system out of that. I’m an industrial designer so I’m very into frameworks and systems. But really when I take those frameworks and I try to cover them and give the personality to them, that’s when I really draw on my experiences as a child. So really, the basic game design starts with this whole framework and system idea and not so much with the story and the characters.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to create things that would shock or surprise or bring enjoyment to people. I’ve tried many different media and really found that video games are the best ones for that.

Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda

Donkey Kong wasn’t directly influenced by Beauty and the Beast. I mean it’s true I’ve been influenced by art at times, but not so much by story. With Donkey Kong, we began development on that game originally with the idea of using Popeye in it. So it wasn’t so much that I was influenced by the story of those movies.

Super Mario Brothers became the perfect game for this jumping around and active expression and just the motion on screen really became the best game for that type of action.

For Zelda, it was kind of this idea of exploring a maze and really getting lost as you’re having an adventure is where the start for that game came from.

In terms of what they mean to me, I have a lot of different feelings about those series. To me, Donkey Kong holds a very precious place for me because that was really the first time I was recognized for my work in game design. I mean, up to that point, video games had been designed mostly by technical people and it was really the first time that a designer had created a game and been recognized for that work.

For Mario, Mario was of course the first game to become a really huge hit all around the world and generate lots and lots of fans. And so for that, Mario will always be close to me. And the Legend of Zelda, too, it was somewhat similar, but really that was the first time that something like a Japanese RPG game, a role-playing game, sold very well overseas and became a huge international hit. I have really different feelings attached to each one of those, but I really like them all a lot.

Pikmin vs. Mario

We released a game called Pikmin and I think Pikmin was a game that really touched people’s emotions in ways that Mario’s games never have.

We actually had a lot of different ideas when we were developing Pikmin and one was that we wanted to try to create a new type of character apart from Mario. So that was one idea we worked with as we went through development. The other was that we were interested in making a game where the player was more of an observer and would watch kind of the world and see how it developed.

We saw gradually with Pikmin these kind of natural changes and the tendency to move it more towards a natural and almost scientific type of a world with some really basic principles working and it really looking more like a true natural environment than some of the Mario games have.

I think the other thing we really wanted to do was try to make it the type of game that anybody can pick up and play and really enjoy. Those were our goals and I think the people have really kind of have been introduced to the Pikmin characters now and I think there’s an interest there to see how they’re going to develop so we’ll probably work on that in the future.

And actually in the years while we were working on Pikmin, I was also getting more and more interested in gardening and working on my own garden and by the end of development it turned out that a lot of gardening-type elements began to appear in the game as well.

Gaming Systems

The Nintendo 64 was really, at long last, the system where we could truly create games and worlds in three dimensions. With the Nintendo GameCube, really what we have now is a system where we can do it without restraints. We have much more capability and we are much freer to create these kinds of worlds. So for us now the question really becomes not so much a question of should we be making 3D games, but a question of how can we use 3D to make game play better and to do new things and whether or not it’s suitable for all games.

The Console Competition

I think really that Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft have some very different views on things. I think the other companies are really looking at this as a hardware business and they’re looking at selling the hardware. At Nintendo, we’re really looking more at the software and we’re looking at the entertainment value.

I think that the fact that there are three hardware systems out there now and the fact that it is creating such publicity for the industry and the fact that the industry as a whole grew so much in the United States over the past year is a good thing.

To me, rather than thinking about the competition between the hardware, really for me a more important topic is thinking about the games I’ve made in the past and thinking about what games I’m going to make in the future and how I can find new ways to bring enjoyment and entertainment to users in the future.

Surprise of Success

I mean there’s a certain number you can expect a game to sell and I thought in Japan it would sell upwards of a million, but beyond that was really beyond my expectations. And for a lot of them I thought, in the US, we could sell a few copies of this game. But once we got past that, I realized that this just wasn’t how good the game was, there was something more at work there. And sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t just intervention from up above.

Current Happenings at Nintendo

So lately I’ve taken on a lot of more managerial style roles within Nintendo and it’s getting quite busy but at the same time I am definitely interested in continuing to work on games and I will continue to work on games. So in the very near future we will be seeing new titles in both the Mario and the Zelda series but at the same time I’m interested also in bringing out new ideas and working on those.

Right now what I’m thinking is that maybe by using the connectivity between the Game Cube and the Game Boy Advance we can use the capacity of that and the functions of that to find some really new and unique styles of game play that we haven’t seen before and I think that by taking advantage of all those capabilities, I’m going to be able to bring to people some really new experiences.

Nintendo and Miyamoto’s Future

Nintendo is a company that thinks very seriously about entertainment. If entertainment were ever to go away, then Nintendo as a company would go away. We’re always thinking about new ways and new frameworks for entertainment that we can create. We’re not trying to create the things that people are expecting; we’re trying to create the things that people never expect. So I’m sure you’re going to be surprised in the future.