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Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto
Born	November 16, 1952 (1952-11-16) (age 56) Sonobe cho, Kyoto, Japan12
Occupation	Game designer, EAD General Manager

Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本 茂, Miyamoto Shigeru^?) (born November 16, 1952 in Sonobe cho, Kyoto, Japan¹) is a Japanese video game designer and producer who has been called the "father of modern video games" and "the Walt Disney of electronic gaming"³ for helping create the Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Pikmin and F-Zero franchises and games such as Nintendogs and Wii Music. He is considered by many^who? to be the greatest and most influential video game designer of all time.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Nintendo 2 Work style 3 Personal life 4 Awards and recognition 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Early life

Miyamoto described childhood experiences such as exploring fields, woods and caves outside Kyoto as an inspiration for The Legend of Zelda⁴ and an antagonizing experience with a neighbor's chained dog, which inspired the Chain Chomp enemies in the Mario series.⁵

Nintendo

First employed by Nintendo as an artist in 1977, he designed one of their first coin-operated arcade games, Radar Scope,⁶ which was less successful in the United States than Nintendo hoped. He then reused the game's hardware and modified it into Donkey Kong, which was a huge success.

Work style

At 1997's E3 convention, Miyamoto revealed that he was constantly working with around four hundred people on around a dozen projects at a time.⁷ However, he has also stated that he prefers to focus on "games in order, one by one" rather than many at once.⁸

Miyamoto has also been known to have Nintendo implement delays "to make a game [...] of the high quality standards that Nintendo is known for",⁹ at times even scrapping the entire development of games. He and fellow developers refer to this scrapping as "Chabudai Gaeshi" (ちゃぶ台返し, "upending the tea table"), a reference to manga and anime Star of the Giants.¹⁰ It is also referred to as "Miyahon Check" (Miyahon is an alternative kanji reading of Miyamoto) or "Miyamoto Test".¹¹

An example of this was Eiji Aonuma's replacement as producer on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess by Miyamoto between 2005 to 2006 so that he could assume direction duties. Aonuma stated that the switch was the result of a year-long development being Chabudai Gaeshi'ed.¹² In the same interview, Miyamoto said that he had to clean up the mess from his Chabudai Gaeshi, so he joined as a producer and assisted in the development of the Nintendo GameCube and Wii versions of the game.

Personal life

Although a game designer, Miyamoto spends little time playing games, preferring to play the guitar and banjo.¹³ He has a Shetland Sheepdog named Pikku (pronounced Pick) that was the inspiration for Nintendogs.¹⁴ He is also a semi-professional dog breeder.¹⁵. He has quoted "Video-games are bad for you? That's what they said about Rock 'N' Roll."¹⁶

Awards and recognition

The name of the main character of the PC game Daikatana, Hiro Miyamoto, is an homage to Miyamoto.¹⁷

In 1998, Miyamoto was honored as the first inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame.¹⁸

On November 28, 2006, Miyamoto was featured in TIME Asia's "60 Years of Asian Heroes," alongside Hayao Miyazaki, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Bruce Lee and the Dalai Lama.³ He was later chosen as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the Year in both 2007¹⁹ and 2008.²⁰

At the Game Developers Choice Awards, on March 7, 2007, Miyamoto received the Lifetime Achievement Award "for a career that spans the creation of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda to the company's recent revolutionary systems, Nintendo DS and Wii."²¹

Both GameTrailers and IGN placed Miyamoto first on their lists for the "Top Ten Game Creators"²² and the "Top 100 Game Creators of All Time"²³ respectively.

In a survey of over 9,000 game developers by industry publication Develop, 30% of the developers chose Miyamoto as their "Ultimate Development Hero".²⁴ Miyamoto has been interviewed by companies and organisations such as CNN's Talk Asia²⁵ and NextLevel.com.²⁶

See also

• List of Nintendo games created by Shigeru Miyamoto
• Nintendo

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Shigeru Miyamoto

• N-Sider – Shigeru Miyamoto profile
• Shigeru Miyamoto profile on MobyGames
• New York Times profile, May 25, 2008
• Video profile of Shigeru Miyamoto from the digital TV series Play Value produced by ON Networks

Persondata
NAME	Miyamoto, Shigeru
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Video game designer for Nintendo
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH