There is such a god man, he can be said to be one of the best in the game industry, and he has also played a very important role in the rise of video games for decades. You may not know his name, but you've certainly played games he designed. He has dominated countless of the best-selling and classic game IPs, and today he is the director of the intelligence department of the famous game company Nintendo, and is the soul of the company.
As a Nintendo ace designer, he has the titles of "father of modern video games" and "most influential game producer", and this person is the "father of Mario" - Shigeru Miyamoto.
After introducing so many famous people, there must be many players who are curious about who "Shigeru Miyamoto" really is, and what is his special story? In order to answer these questions, this time I will tell you the story of Shigeru Miyamoto.
Shigeru Miyamoto, born on November 16, 1952 in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, is now 68 years old, and although he has reached retirement age, he has publicly stated that he will not retire in recent years, which is undoubtedly the biggest benefit for modern players. Today, Shigeru Miyamoto is still a first-class game designer in the game industry, and I believe that as long as he is there, Nintendo will definitely launch a lot of divine works.
In an era when technology was not so developed, Miyamoto's favorite thing to do when he was a child was to explore the wilderness and enjoy the whole process of travel. During one of the expeditions he found a cave, but he hesitated for several days whether to go in, and finally he walked in alone with all his equipment and found the exit at the other end of the cave. This experience was of great significance to him, as it provided a lot of inspiration for Miyamoto's future game creations, the best of which is The Legend of Zelda.
In his youth, Shigeru Miyamoto was relatively important to his family because his father was an English teacher. Shigeru Miyamoto, who had just graduated from high school, chose to study industrial design at Kanazawa University of Fine Arts and Technology, a university specializing in the arts, and has discovered many talents in the past, including Hosoda Mori, who has participated in the production of anime such as Digimon Adventure, Slam Dunk Master, and Dragon Ball.
During his college years, Shigeru Miyamoto fell in love with drawing manga, and from then on he aspired to become a manga artist, but the manga artist did not succeed, but became a game designer. In the era when arcade games began to rise, Shigeru Miyamoto was attracted to the classic spaceship shooter game Of The Space Invaders, which occupied the entire Japanese game market at the time.
In this way, Shigeru Miyamoto had the idea of making a game, and since his father was also a staff member of Nintendo at that time, under the recommendation of his father, Shigeru Miyamoto designed a toy for the then president Yamauchi. Since Nintendo at that time was mainly based on cards and toys, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to show his strength in this way, but he did not expect to be recognized by Yamauchi. At this point, Shigeru Miyamoto officially became an employee of Nintendo's planning department in 1977.
With the change of the times, Nintendo also began to enter the game market. Shigeru Miyamoto's first project was a game called Inspector, in which he was responsible for the art design, and his first official involvement in game development was in 1980. It's a project called Radar Range, and while this arcade game sells very well in Japan, it's less popular in overseas markets. This led to a lot of arcade machines piled up in the warehouse, and Nintendo once faced a financial crisis.
At this time, Yamauchi came up with a way to implant new games with arcade machines that could not be sold. And this important plan, Yamauchi Pu handed over to Shigeru Miyamoto, who voluntarily served as a supervisor, and whether the company could turn over could only depend on Shigeru Miyamoto's performance. His first inspiration was derived from the classic American cartoon Popeye, which he emulated the cartoon's love triangle and presumably envisioned a game concept consisting of three characters, a gorilla, a carpenter, and a girl.
Shigeru Miyamoto was full of confidence in his ideas, but after all, he was a student of design, and naturally wanted to make the game more special, so he had a variety of complex concepts with different sizes, different directions, and different reactions, which was very difficult for the technology at that time. So he also tried his best to cooperate with the technical engineers in the company to make the most perfect plan.
Eventually, Shigeru Miyamoto came up with a game concept that moves on platforms and has stairs, rollers, and obstacles that can be climbed. So they designed a 2D game, which was sent to Nintendo's subsidiary in the United States for testing. Because a more formal name was needed to promote overseas markets, Nintendo named the protagonist of the game "Pauline" and the craftsman "Mario", and named the game "Dnkey Kong".
Donkey Kong achieved unexpectedly good results, and Shigeru Miyamoto became famous overnight. Due to the success of the game, he also released a number of sequels, and even Donkey Kong won the "Best Single Player Game" award in 1983.
After his success, Shigeru Miyamoto was not proud of this, but immersed himself in creating new works. He then made an exclusive game for Mario and designed a twin brother for it, Luigi, and this game is Super Mario. In order to make the character more suitable, Miyamoto also changed Mario, who was originally set as a carpenter, into a character who looked more like a plumber. Not surprisingly, the game was also critically acclaimed, and to this day, the Mario series has a history of more than three decades, but it is still one of the most high-profile game IPs in the world.
Having just mentioned those that are basically arcade titles, let's talk about the late 1980s, when home consoles began to rise, when Nintendo had begun to develop home consoles and console games. In 1983, Nintendo's first home game console, Family Computer( was interviewed, and Shigeru Miyamoto also spent several years developing two of the most iconic works for FC, Super Mary's Brothers and The Legend of Zelda.
These two games were not only popular in the past, but even today they are very inspiring works, and have also launched a lot of sequels. So why are these two games so special? The reason for this is that the games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto always have their own uniqueness, and these two works are more focused on gameplay and overall experience than the games that were at the time of the highest scores.
Shigeru Miyamoto once said that when designing games, he tries to avoid trends and only focuses on his own style. Compared with other games that follow the trend, Nintendo's games tend to have higher recognition and uniqueness. It is worth mentioning that when someone asked about the inspiration for "The Legend of Zelda", Miyamoto replied that he often traveled to the wild when he was a child, and would also paint the scenes he had seen, and said that he himself would not take a map with him when he was exploring, trying to find a way out in his own way, and the things he saw on the way would become the best memories.
At this time, Shigeru Miyamoto also realized the feeling of happiness that adventure could bring him, and he wanted to share this feeling with everyone, so basically "The Legend of Zelda" is a work full of Miyamoto's childhood memories. In addition to continuing to launch sequels to Mario and Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto has also been involved in the production of many classic games produced by Nintendo, such as "Iceberg Climber", "Light Culture", "Starfire Fox", "Fight Duck" and so on.
Among them, Starfirefox is the second 3D game launched by Nintendo, and the first is "X" supervised by Sakamoto Kayo. After the launch of the Super Nintendo game console, Shigeru Miyamoto also produced two other representative works: "Super Mario World" and "Super Mario RPG". Super Mario RPG is more special, he hired another developer Square, the development team of the "Final Fantasy" series. Shigeru Miyamoto later became a mentor to Pokémon developer Tomomochi Tajiri and directed the development of the first work in the series, Pokémon Red/Blue.
After the console "Nintendo 64" landed on the market, Shigeru Miyamoto also dominated Mario's first 3D game, Super Mario 64, as well as "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time", which was also presented in 3D. Between 2000 and 2010, Shigeru Miyamoto basically focused only on the two most popular Series, Mario and Zelda, and launched many sequels on different platforms.
Next up is the Nintendo's much-anticipated game console Wii, which is undoubtedly a milestone for consoles. Shigeru Miyamoto also played a very important role during the development, and he hoped that the console would enhance the relationship between each family member, so he had the idea of developing Wii Fit.
In the 2004 E3, in order to introduce the new "Zelda" work, Miyamoto shigeru personally appeared in front of everyone with Link's sword and shield, and the audience began to cheer enthusiastically, which was also known as the most classic scene ever seen by Nintendo at the E3 exhibition.
Since 2011, Shigeru Miyamoto has not been as active in the field of game development as before, and has appeared more as a director, executive producer, and mentor. In 2015, former Nintendo president Satoshi Iwata died of illness at the age of 55. Subsequently, Nintendo also announced that it would temporarily replace the board of directors with Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda.
Fast forward to 2018, and Shigeru Miyamoto announced that he would be involved in the production of a film about Super Mario, which is expected to be released in 2022. Recently, Shigeru Miyamoto has also been mainly busy building a super attractive Nintendo theme park, Super Nintendo World. This theme park will be opened in an area of Universal Studios, and now Japan's Nintendo Park has opened in the past few months, but unfortunately, the epidemic is now showing signs of heating up around the world, and it is still unrealistic to play.
Shigeru Miyamoto has been loyal to Nintendo for more than forty years since he entered the game industry, and if he had not joined that year, I believe that Nintendo would not have stood firm in the position of today's game giant, and the game industry would not be as colorful as it is today. I wonder what everyone thinks about Shigeru Miyamoto? Leave a message in the comments section and discuss it with everyone.