The Original Creators: Shigeru Miyamoto

Each week we pay homage to a select "Original Creator" — an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today's creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Shigeru Miyamoto.

Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the founding fathers of video gaming. His unique take on this virtual form of play has influenced generations of video game players, developers, and designers. His most famous creation, a little Italian plumber with a mustache and some blue dungarees, has cast a large-nosed shadow over the gaming world and the culture that surrounds it. His work for the company Nintendo, along with fellow video game designer and frequent collaborator Takashi Tezuka, has defined the pixelated digital landscapes of gaming, while also defining the company itself, with Miyamoto’s games appearing on every platform they’ve released. His Midas touch can be felt in many games he helped create, born from his ability and desire to put himself in the position of the gamer even though, strangely, he doesn’t play video games at home. These games created a foundation for gaming, not just as a framework for the intricacies of gameplay but also culturally. Mario is a pop cultural icon, arguably as recognizable as Mickey Mouse, who permeates the digital culture of the internet and has been reinterpreted by digital artists like Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, creating a subculture all its own.

Miyamoto’s rural upbringing in the village of Sonobe, in the Kyoto Prefecture of Japan, would go on to influence and inform his games. Exploring river valleys and wooded mountains on bike and foot, his young mind was impregnated with these enchanted places and their influence can be felt in his creations—from the browns and greens that would color his games, to the thrill and wonder of discovery. The famous self-mythologizing cave story that he retells, where he came across a hole in the ground which, when explored with a lantern, was found to be a small cavern, shows how these childhood sensations have inspired his game design. Perhaps most explicitly felt in the Zelda franchise, with their quests in magical woodlands, journeys across rolling hills and through hidden caves. Taking inspiration from his life for his games is something of a trait, not only used for the Zelda games but also titles like Nintendogs, which was inspired by the family pet.

While the early wave of arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders focused on achieving high scores, Miyamoto’s games were about the pure joys of gameplay. There was a distinct focus on the experience and engagement, on complete immersion in another world, and this is perhaps his greatest gaming legacy—the idea that the experience is what matters, the unalloyed joys of controlling a character, leaping and jumping, problem solving, sword slashing, and exploring are all factors that combined create that mysterious pull that makes you want to wake up and immediately continue your quest. The obsessive nature that, for good or ill, is part of video gaming has always been integral to Miyamoto’s work.

Below are some of the seminal video gaming moments of his career:

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

With this title, a phenomenon was born, resurrecting the gaming industry and giving the world the Mushroom Kingdom and all the iconography that went with it. The coins, the power-ups, the jumping, the enemies, and a plot—rescue Princess Peach (called Princess Toadstool in this game) from King Koopa—all these elements would remain unchanged throughout all the Mario platform titles. Last year, the plumber celebrated his 25th anniversary and with over 240 million game units sold, it’s the biggest selling gaming franchise of all time.

The Legend of Zelda (1986)

Along with his partner Takashi Tezuka, Miyamoto directed, produced, and designed this adventure puzzle game set in Hyrule, starring Link, a character whose appearance is akin to Robin Hood, and whose mission is to rescue Princess Zelda from the evil Ganon. It most heavily uses imagery associated with Miyamoto’s rural childhood and those youthful explorations across fields and woodland. In contrast to Super Mario Bros., which was a linear side-scrolling platformer, this required the gamer to solve puzzles in a non-linear fashion from an overhead perspective.

Super Mario 64 (1996)

This title left a lasting influence on the world of 3D gaming and game design. It integrated the dynamic camera with the use of free-roaming gameplay, usually reserved for games like those similar to the Zelda franchise. The use of an analog joystick and 3D polygons were revolutionary and, like Super Mario Bros., helped change the landscape of gaming and platform games especially. It paved the way for the invention found in Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, keeping the genre fresh and alive.

Nintendo Wii (2006)

Miyamoto co-lead the team that came up with the Wii and helped design the controller, the Wiimote, showing he’s just as adept at creating successful hardware as he is successful software. As a rival to Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, it outsold them both. Heralding the beginning of motion-controlled gaming, it also opened up the world of gaming to a non-traditional audience with family generations gathering round to battle each other at Wii Tennis or bowling, rather than partaking in the more traditional board game.

No other single person has had quite the impact on modern gaming that Miyamoto has—on both its software and hardware. He’s the first superstar game designer and although, like filmmaking, the process of game design is a collaborative one, his position is like that of the director. Guiding the process, shaping it, Miyamoto functions as an auteur, an artist whose significance on modern culture has seen him profiled in high-culture magazines like The New Yorker and revered like a musical icon. So it’s perhaps interesting, while not entirely fitting, that the quote often attributed to him: “Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock-n-roll.” should place him in the position of rock star. His time at Nintendo, where he’s been since 1977, has seen his involvement in over 100 titles and most recently in bringing 3D to the handheld market with the 3DS. He’s appeared twice in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year and his games are often cited in “best of all time” lists. Like Walt Disney’s lasting influence on animation, his work will continue to influence game designers, many of whom grew up playing his titles. He’s also seen as seminal in resuscitating the industry in the 1980s, when it was stagnating, giving birth to modern home console culture. Along with his legacy, the endurance of Mario lives on, with his most recent incursion Super Mario Galaxy 2, continuing to break new ground in the platforming genre, so much so, that it will be hard to top. And perhaps that’s Miyamoto’s greatest and only true opponent: himself.