"How High can You Go?": the Games of Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto is the designer of many of the world's most popular games. Games that started genres all their own. Games like Donkey Kong. Super Mario Bros. Mario 64. The Legend of Zelda.He rides his bike to work every day and plays acoustic guitar and banjo for fun. Who is this guy?
To begin at the beginning, he was born in 1952 in Sonebe, a rural village near Kyoto, Japan. Not having any video games, young Shigeru grew up running, playing and exploring in the fields and forests outside his house.

"And whenever we are making this kind of thing, what we always keep in mind is 'what was important for us when we were children'? What was fun then? That is the core of many of my games."

He did programming, art, and music on his first game for Nintendo, Donkey Kong. Not really that uncommon at the time, games being as small as they were. Donkey Kong is a game structured like a story- a goal, a protagonist, an antagonist, and obstacles to that goal. In 1980, Nintendo of America had released an arcade game called Radarscope, which was a flop. And so they had all these arcade consoles they didn't know what to do with. Young Miyamoto, with his freshly minted degree in industrial design, was assigned to make a game on the existing hardware. He consulted with Nintendo's engineers to figure out the hardware, but as mentioned before, he did everything himself. The results made video game history. Interesting that his first game was intended for the American market, with a villian modeled on an American movie(Kong), and an Italian carpenter (Jumpman, later renamed Mario (and retrained as a plumber)after the landlord at Nintendo's American headquarters).

"For me, game creation is like expression through music. When I am working as a director on a game, while I always try to hit upon new plots, I place great importance on the tempo of the game and the sound effects. I feel that those directors who have been able to incorporate rhythm and emotional stimuli in their games have been successful."

Super Mario Bros. was the first game franchise. Not a sequel, but an entirely different game from Donkey Kong, using the same player character- Mario. It was the first side-scrolling, platform-jumping game. It was much copied, so much that it became its own genre. It was also specifically made for the home system, the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES). It had long levels and many more of them, as well as the elements of exploration, discovery, and breaking of boundaries. It was meant to give much more play time than an arcade game, where time is money. I don't need to say that it was wildly successful.

"but of course, with the evolution of the technology, the graphics will get even better, clearer, and yet that's not the only cause we should aim for. Rather, we should put more emphasis on the ideas-- new ideas-- unprecedented, unique ideas. Ideas that aren't connected to the available technology. I would like to encourage everybody to think that way, otherwise we will not find a new way to further explorer and adventure in this unprecedented media called video games."

Miyamoto again defined where the industry was to go with Super Mario 64, the first Mario game in 3-D. Controlling a character in a 3-D world was entirely novel, and the techniques used to control Mario were easy to learn, yet had depth and complexity to them. I've noticed that no two people control Mario alike. Simply going from place to place in the world is fun and expressive. Every 3-D action game since takes at least some paradigms from Mario 64, but no game since has duplicated the sheer fun and complexity-in-simplicity of this pioneering title. It's still fun today.
How is he able to do it? How does he make games that are both original and popular, games that transcend time? I don't know, but I'll close with a final Miyamoto quote that may shed some light:

" I have never created a game that has been of a level that I could be satisfied with."