The Pioneer of Gaming, Shigeru Miyamoto

Perhaps the most famous name in all of video game design is also the creator of some of the most prolific series in video gaming, such as Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong. This man is Shigeru Miyamoto, a frontrunner for gaming’s most prolific designer, having been in the business since the 1980’s, and still going strong as a lead designer at Nintendo.

As a child, Miyamoto spent a lot of his time drawing and exploring the nearby cave systems instead of dedicating time to his studies. Exploring these caves helped inspire one of gaming’s most famous series, The Legend of Zelda. In his spare time, he developed a love for art, and in particular, developed a taste for Manga, a type of Japanese comic; this description is not wholly accurate, but suffice to say it conveys the type of hobbies Miyamoto enjoyed. This love for manga, in particular, lead him to pursue a career in industrial arts during college; however, he aimlessly drifted around after college, unable to land a job with his industrial arts degree; he considered being a manga artist, but ultimately, it was through the efforts of his father he landed an interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, a friend of Miyamoto’s father, and the CEO of a small toy company named Nintendo.

Miyamoto became the first design staff member of Nintendo, and his first job was to convert old cabinets of the game Radarscope, Nintendo’s failed attempt at breaking into the video game market, into a brand new game to get rid of the spare cabinets. Miyamoto began the process by first conceiving a story to build a game around, a novel process at the time; almost everyone else at the time built a game to try and exploit technology to its fullest, but Miyamoto brought the idea of building a game around a story into the mainstream. He initially fleshed out an idea involving Popeye, Bruno, and Olive Oyl, but Nintendo was not able to get the trademarks for those brands. Instead, Miyamoto made a game based upon a King Kongesque character who kidnapped a carpenter’s girlfriend, and decided the game would be playing as the carpenter to jump over barrels to go and save his girlfriend. He released the game Donkey Kong, and the game was a monumental success leading him to release Donkey Kong 2 and Donkey Kong 3. 

After creating these games, Miyamoto would move on to create Mario Bros, a game featuring the carpenter from Donkey Kong as the star of his own game, alongside his brother Luigi. However, it was the sequel to this game that would garner Nintendo worldwide acclaim and be a smash hit onto the world scene; Super Mario Bros. The game featured influences of Miyamoto’s childhood sliding in and out of doors and winding through various cave systems, and attempted to capture that same influence by featuring the player warping through various levels that lead to seemingly endless new directions. The game even had an original music score to accompany it throughout your adventure to set the mood, a first for video games at the time.

Other notable video games by Miyamoto include The Legend of Zelda series, which is more literally inspired by Miyamoto’s childhood of exploring caves, and attempting to do his best to convey the experience he felt when exploring those caves through how you progress through the Zelda games. Another game series, Nintendogs, was inspired by Miyamoto’s attempts to be a dog breeder. Pikmin, a game about controlling an army of tiny creatures to help you do tasks, was inspired by Miyamoto being fascinated by how a colony of ants functioned and wanting to translate it to a game.

Miyamoto’s design process is very unique compared to a lot of developers, and broke a lot of new ground for his games; he, as referenced in Csikszentmihalyi, oscillates between his real life and the fantasies he creates and creates something incredibly creative as a result; Mario is the wonder he felt in discovering new things as a child put into a video game that is all about following the new paths to new, exciting places. The Legend of Zelda was about him discovering caves in real life and exploring them, and creating a new world where the whole purpose was to systematically solve puzzles and go deeper into the rich, well thought out world. Pikmin was him taking an ant’s colony, and creating a place where utilizing their unique talents were the only way to get through the game unscathed. Miyamoto pioneered, and is still a master, of the technique of translating his real world experiences into a fantasy world that people can lose themselves in.

Another creative technique Miyamoto uses is focusing primarily on the user than on the vision he wishes to create. Many video game creators focus primarily on the message they want to deliver and the experience they want to convey; Miyamoto does do some of that, on account of believing motion controls help immerse people in the game better than regular controls, but he primarily focuses upon creating a game the user wants to play; he sits down, play his own game, and thinks about what he could do to make the game a better experience; his creativity comes from putting himself in another person’s shoes, and simply catering to delivering a wonderful, holistic, and polished experience. Almost every Mario game that has ever been released, in terms of ones developed by Miyamoto, have been met with critical acclaim and widespread praise, a testament to how successful Miyamoto’s methodology can be. Not all of Miyamoto’s works have the same level of success, but almost all of them have dedicated fans.

Miyamoto is definitely a Big-C creative when it comes to the impact he had; he is the first video game designer to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame, showing that he was the pioneer leading the way in the field, and has the most decorated video game collection that he has designed; it is impossible to find someone who has had an impact on the field is as storied as Miyamoto’s, a man whose single handedly created multiple storied video game franchises that almost all remain gaming mainstays to this day.