Home > Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本茂 Miyamoto Shigeru) (born November 16, 1952) is the Japanese creator of Donkey Kong and related Mario games as well as the Legend of Zelda and Pikmin series for Nintendo. He is one of the world's most celebrated video game designers, and often called one of the fathers of the modern video game. His titles are characterised by refined control-mechanics and interactive worlds in which the players are encouraged to discover things for themselves.

He is currently the Director and General Manager of Nintendo Entertainment, Analysis, and Development (EAD), the corporate sector of Nintendo of Japan. In 1998, Miyamoto became the first person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame.

Employed by Nintendo (then a toy company) as an artist, in 1980 he was given the task of designing one of their first coin-op arcade games. The resulting title Donkey KongDonkey Kong is an arcade game created by Nintendo, released in 1981. The game introduced two of Nintendo's most important characters, Mario and Donkey Kong. In the game, the player's character " Jumpman" (later: "Mario") must rescue his girlfriend Pauline was a huge success and the game's lead character Mario has become Nintendo's mascotFor the suburb of Sydney, Australia, see Mascot, New South Wales . For the American city, see Mascot, Tennessee . A mascot is some thing, typically an animal or human character used to represent a group with a common identity, such as a school, profession. Miyamoto quickly became Nintendo's star producer and built a large stable of franchises for the company, most of which are still active and very well-regarded.

At odds with standard industry practices, Miyamoto showed unwillingness to rehash existing titles and would rarely create a sequel without significantly evolving the game into a fresh experience. However, this is somewhat less true now than it was in the heyday of the Super FamicomSNES, though the controllers are almost the same. The console is similar to the European SNES. Super Famicom ( Japanese:) was a videogame console released by Nintendo in Japan. For information about the North American and European versions of this console and the Super Nintendo; the increasing complexity of game development has meant that he is now spread rather thinner over more titles and only a few GameCubeThe Nintendo GameCube ( Japanese: ; originally code-named "Dolphin" during development; abbreviated as GCN is Nintendo's fourth home video game console, belonging to the 128-bit era; the same generation as Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's PlayStation 2, and Micro titles have shone through as true Miyamoto games, most notably the Pikmin series.

1 Biography

Shigeru Miyamoto was born in Sonobe-cho, Kyoto, Japan. As a young boy, Miyamoto loved to draw, paint pictures, and explore the landscape surrounding his home. In 1970, he enrolled in the Kanazawa Munici College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, and graduated five years later, though he would later remark that his studies often took a backseat to doodling. In 1977, Miyamoto, armed with a degree in industrial design, scored a meeting with Hiroshi Yamauchi -- a friend of his father, and the head of Nintendo of Japan. Yamauchi hired Miyamoto to be a "staff artist," and assigned him to apprentice in the planning department.

In 1980, the fairly new American branch of Nintendo released "Radarscope," an arcade game they hoped would kickstart a long reign of success, but instead turned out to be a huge flop. To stay afloat, Nintendo of America desperately needed a smash-hit game. Hiroshi Yamauchi assigned Miyamoto— the only person available— the task of creating the game that would make or break the company.

After consulting with some of the company´s engineers (Miyamoto had no prior programming experience), and composing the music himself on a small electronic keyboard, Donkey Kong was born.

Miyamoto is usually listed as "producer" in the credits of Mario games. The few exceptions include the Mario Land series, which he had virtually nothing to do with. In early US releases, when translation was poorer, he was sometimes credited as Miyahon (a misreading of the kanji 本 in his name).

Other inventions by Miyamoto are the L/R buttons and the analog control stick, which are now standard features on gamepads. [1]