When Shigeru Miyamoto went to see Nintendo’s president about a job in 1977, he brought a sack of coat hangers. He had carved them for children out of soft wood, in the shapes of an elephant, a bird and a chicken, because, he explained, the hooks of metal hangers could hurt a child. “We need engineers, not painters,” Hiroshi Yamauchi had said before agreeing to meet him as a favour to Miyamoto’s father. He hired him anyway. Four years later the young artist had designed Donkey Kong, and its carpenter hero became Mario.
Much of what is known about his early career comes from David Sheff’s Game Over, for which Sheff interviewed Miyamoto and his colleagues.
Fast facts
- Born: 1952, in Sonobe, near Kyoto.
- Education: industrial design at Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, from 1970.
- Joined Nintendo: 1977, as its first staff artist, apprenticed to the planning department.
- First video game: Donkey Kong (1981).
- From 1984: head of a new development division, R&D4, making Famicom games, including Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986).
- Now: Executive Fellow and Representative Director, Member of the Board, of Nintendo.
Growing up
Miyamoto grew up in the countryside outside Kyoto, in a house of paper and cedar where sliding screens seemed to open on endless hidden rooms. The family had no television and no car. He drew, made puppets and put on shows, and explored the hills and creek beds. Sheff tells of him finding the mouth of a cave and going back several times before he dared to go in with a home-made lantern.
He took five years to finish his course at Kanazawa, because he went to about half his classes. He spent the rest of the time sketching, listening to records and playing bluegrass guitar, in a duo with a banjo player he had found in Kyoto. He also played a lot of video games, and when Yamauchi later asked him for one, he said the games of the day were “unimaginative” and asked why they could not tell stories the way books and films did.
Donkey Kong
Nintendo’s arcade game Radar Scope had failed in America. Nintendo of America had ordered three thousand machines and was left with more than two thousand it could not sell. Its president, Minoru Arakawa, could replace the circuit boards inside the cabinets, but he needed a new game to put on them. In Sheff’s account Yamauchi had no one else free, so he gave the job to Miyamoto, with Gunpei Yokoi overseeing him.
Miyamoto threw away the Radar Scope design. A deal to use Popeye fell through, so he made up his own characters: an ape that escapes from its owner, “a funny, hang-loose kind of guy” who has not treated it well, and runs off with the man’s girlfriend. The hero was an ordinary carpenter, and Miyamoto started with the nose, a big one with a bushy moustache beneath it: “Noses say a great deal.” Engineers told him what would read on a low-resolution screen, and the rest followed. He got bright overalls so his body stood out, arms that swung so the movement showed, and a cap, because hair would have had to move when he fell. “Also,” Miyamoto told Sheff, “I cannot come up with hairstyles so good.” Yokoi turned down many of his ideas, and Miyamoto wrote the music himself on an electronic keyboard.
The staff at Nintendo of America thought the result was a disaster. It went into a Seattle bar called the Spot Tavern, and took $30 on its first night. The Americans named the princess Pauline and the carpenter Mario, after their warehouse landlord. Donkey Kong became Nintendo’s first big arcade hit, and Miyamoto also adapted it for Yokoi’s Game & Watch handhelds.
Mario and Zelda
In 1984 Yamauchi put Miyamoto in charge of a new division, R&D4, to make games for the Famicom. He redrew Mario, who had already become a plumber with a brother, Luigi, in the arcade Mario Bros. of 1983. Super Mario Bros. (1985) was the game that, in N64 Magazine’s words, “sold the NES in the west”. Sheff counts eight Mario games produced by Miyamoto between 1985 and 1991, selling 60 to 70 million copies in all.
Sheff traces much of his work back to that childhood. “When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake,” Miyamoto told him. “It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it.” Wandering into places without a map became part of The Legend of Zelda, and Sheff connects its labyrinths to the rooms of the house in Sonobe. Of the cave, Miyamoto said: “The spirit, the state of mind of a kid when he enters a cave alone must be realized in the game.” A manhole cover set in a wall near his flat in Kyoto, which he walked past every day and never opened, has its answer in Super Mario Bros., where the player can do what Miyamoto never did: go inside.
Producer
As R&D4 grew, Miyamoto moved from directing games to producing them, a title he liked because it was the one his hero George Lucas held. Instead of one game at a time, he oversaw several, each with six to twenty people working on it for a year or more. Sheff describes him laying a nearly finished game’s plan across a room of tables pushed together, and living with it for days, going through it in his head. He marked the points that were too hard or too easy, added a power-up here, and made sure the best surprises came often enough. Then he sent it back to the team to change. Sheff also records that he was “a terrible manager” who needed an assistant to keep the division organised. The music on many of these games was by the in-house composer Koji Kondo.
He kept that overseeing role for decades. When Nintendo’s American studio Retro Studios made Metroid Prime (2002), Retro’s Mark Pacini recalled, “Mr Miyamoto came to us with the idea of playing a Metroid game from the first-person perspective”. In 2015 Nintendo made him a Creative Fellow, and his current title is Executive Fellow and Representative Director.
Sources
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 6, August 1983, p. 91: Mario Bros., in which Mario has “become a plumber with his brother, Luigi”.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 3, “I, Mario” (his childhood, Kanazawa, joining Nintendo in 1977 and the coat hangers, Donkey Kong’s design, the Game & Watch versions, R&D4 in 1984, Mario and Luigi, the lake, the cave and the manhole, the producer role and his method, Kondo, the eight Mario games); chapters 5 and 6, “Coming to America” and “For a Fistful of Quarters” (Radar Scope’s failure in America, Donkey Kong at the Spot Tavern, naming Pauline and Mario).
- N64 Magazine issue 2, May 1997, Nintendo history feature from p. 90: Miyamoto joining in 1977; Donkey Kong; Super Mario Bros. “was the game that sold the NES in the west”.
- Retro Gamer: 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die (Future Publishing), feature on Metroid Prime with Mark Pacini and Kensuke Tanabe: Miyamoto’s first-person idea.
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., “Directors/Executive Officers” (web): “Executive Fellow and Representative Director, Member of the Board”. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/en/officer/index.html
- Wikipedia, “Shigeru Miyamoto” (web, secondary): date and place of birth; appointment as Creative Fellow in September 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Miyamoto