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1999 GDC Coverage

Profile of Miyamoto

If video games were a religion (aren’t they?), Shigeru Miyamoto would be Confucius. When we are lucky, like the solitary monk on the hill, he comes down and drops words like gems, forcing our limited perception of game design to widen.

Today is our lucky day.

Shigeru Miyamoto will be the GDC keynote speaker, presenting this evening at 6:15 at the San Jose Civic Auditorium. He has been with Nintendo since 1977 (starting as a staff artist) and is currently general manager of the company’s Entertainment Analysis and Development Department in Kyoto, Japan.

He basically made the "Nintendo" game: he’s the guy behind the Mario, the Zelda, the Donkey Kong, and over 60 other Nintendo games. He is also behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the fastest selling video game of all time.

Using his ocarina, Miyamoto will take the GDC audience back to the way games used to be designed.

"I believe I am still young, but I look around me and see all these young people and realize that I’m old. I started on video games 20 years ago. Most designers today don’t know much about how it was 20 years ago. I want to show them what I’ve seen and have been through."

Another topic to be addressed in the 75-minute speech will be making the user/player the primary concern, since they are the audience.

"Videogames are entertainment and we always have to think of the users. We have the commodities, videogames in this case, and without the users it’s nothing," he says.

Miyamoto’s genius, like anything pure, crosses all technological barriers. Was the original Super Mario Brothers not as complete a world as Super Mario 64? Perhaps that is why the Mario and Zelda series, in particular, retain the great game play principles a decade after the originals. As such, Miyamoto says passionately that technology isn’t the road to better games.

"I understand the evolution of technology may appeal to people, but not always will the technology make people more comfortable," Miyamoto says.

He continues, "It is important to put first priority the comfort of the people. It has to be first… you always have to take a stand and think of the user’s comfort."

As for the future? For all the excellent games he has helped create, Miyamoto remains humble and says he doesn’t know what’s coming. In fact, it sounds as though he likes it that way.

"The industry is interesting because you don’t know what will happen next year. I don’t want limitations. I don’t want limitations of hardware, only working on the next-generation Nintendo platform. I don’t want the limitations of following trends. I don’t want these woes in front of me. I just want a flat horizon," Miyamoto says. "It might be a flat disc today, but a Frisbee tomorrow. I want no limitations on the exploration of entertainment."

Miyamoto perhaps best describes his view by saying, "It may sound strange today, but tomorrow it may be normal."

After all, chubby plumbers weren’t that popular in the ‘70’s, were they?

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