Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer, artist and producer, and the creator of The Legend of Zelda series.
Biography[]
During his childhood, Miyamoto enjoyed exploring the countryside and hillsides around his home, which inspired the creation of the Zelda franchise.[1] He joined Nintendo in 1977, where he began developing early arcade games such as Sheriff and Donkey Kong (his first major hit), and through his long and highly successful professional career, would become one of the most accomplished and influential video game designers in the world and made the company widely known as it is today (Nintendo before Miyamoto's employment was a small Japanese card/toy manufacturer). Shortly before starting development for Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto began developing The Legend of Zelda as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System (an add-on for the Japanese version of the NES).[2] Since then, he has worked as the producer of every game in The Legend of Zelda series. He is also the creator of other iconic Nintendo franchises such as Mario, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, Star Fox, and Pikmin, as well as Nintendogs, and played important roles in the creation of Metroid and Pokemon. In 2002, Shigeru Miyamoto served as one of Nintendo's representative directors as an executive and was promoted to the title of Fellow at Nintendo in 2015. He continues to work at Nintendo to this day.
The Legend of Zelda games[]
| Game | Position |
|---|---|
| The Legend of Zelda | Producer, Director |
| The Adventure of Link | Producer |
| A Link to the Past | Producer |
| Link's Awakening | Producer |
| BS The Legend of Zelda | Designer |
| Ocarina of Time | Producer, Supervisor |
| Link's Awakening DX | Producer |
| Majora's Mask | Producer, Supervisor |
| Oracle of Seasons | General Producer |
| Oracle of Ages | General Producer |
| A Link to the Past & Four Swords | Producer |
| The Wind Waker | Producer |
| Four Swords Adventures | Producer |
| The Minish Cap | General Producer |
| Twilight Princess | Producer |
| Phantom Hourglass | General Producer |
| Link's Crossbow Training | General Producer |
| Spirit Tracks | General Producer |
| Ocarina of Time 3D | General Producer |
| Four Swords Anniversary Edition | General Producer |
| Skyward Sword | General Producer |
| The Wind Waker HD | Producer |
| A Link Between Worlds | General Producer |
| Majora's Mask 3D | Producer, Supervisor |
| Tri Force Heroes | General Producer |
| Twilight Princess HD | General Producer |
| Breath of the Wild | General Producer |
Trivia[]
- The Adventure of Link is the only The Legend of Zelda game Miyamoto considers a failure,[3] due to the limitations of the NES hardware.[4] It is also his least favorite game of all time that he has worked on.
- He also dislikes the art style of The Wind Waker as well.
- Miyamoto himself played the mandolin in The Wind Waker's title theme.[5]
- Shigeru Miyamoto has often been described by many as the video game equivalent of Walt Disney and Stan Lee.
- Shigeru's favorite games are often older Mario series titles from the NES and Super NES era, specifically Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario World. He also heavily enjoys Pokemon GO.
- His favorite The Legend of Zelda series game is Link's Awakening, as he said he and his team had fun developing it and he was even playing it the whole time. According to himself, Skyward Sword is the best Zelda title rather than Ocarina of Time.
- In terms of third-party games, according to Kotaku in 2020, Miyamoto is interested in Pac-Man and Tetris.
- Ironically, although Shigeru Miyamoto is universally known as one of the greatest video game designers and producers, he actually spends very little time playing video games himself. In his free time he prefers to play music on the guitar, mandolin, and banjo, as well as rearranging furniture.
Miyamoto with Tezuka (left) and Kondo (right) during a Super Mario Maker promotion in 2015
- Fellow longtime Nintendo employees Takashi Tezuka and Koji Kondo are among Shigeru Miyamoto's best friends.
- Despite being an important figure in Japan and the rest of the world, Miyamoto doesn't appear on Japanese television, as to minimize his chance of being recognized. Because of this, more foreign tourists than Japanese people approach him. He also usually does not sign autographs to fans due to concern that he would be inundated (though he still allows pictures). Although he does know and speak some English, Shigeru is not fluent in this language and prefers to speak in Japanese during interviews.
- Miyamoto has made several quotes well-known to the public, such as "Video games are bad for you? That's what they say about rock and roll.", and "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
- Fitting for his work in the Nintendogs games, Miyamoto himself is in fact a semi-professional dog breeder.
Gallery[]
Signature of Shigeru Miyamoto from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Official Nintendo Player's Guide by Nintendo Power
Miyamoto (right) with Eiji Aonuma in the E3 2016
Shigeru in a Zelda game promotion
Miyamoto as of 2024
Nomenclature[]
 Names in Other Regions 
| ||
|---|---|---|
| Language | Name | |
 |
Japanese | 宮本 茂 (Miyamoto Shigeru) |
References
- ↑ "When I was younger, I grew up in the countryside of Japan. And what that meant was I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hillsides and having fun outdoors. When I got into the upper elementary school ages — that was when I really got into hiking and mountain climbing. There's a place near Kobe where there's a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and there's a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top. And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake. And so it was around that time that I really began to start drawing on my experiences as a child and bringing that into game development." —Shigeru Miyamoto (Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto On The Origins Of Nintendo's Famous Characters)
- ↑ "First, we started making The Legend of Zelda, and then we started Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda was for the Family Computer Disk System, so we decided to finish up Super Mario Bros. first." —Shigeru Miyamoto (The Legend of Zelda Developer Interview)
- ↑ "Compared to Legend of Zelda, Zelda II went exactly what we expected... All games I make usually gets better in the development process, since good ideas keep coming, but Zelda II was sort of a failure..." —Shigeru Miyamoto (SUPER PLAY MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS SHIGERU MIYAMOTO ABOUT THE LEGEND OF ZELDA)
- ↑ "I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing, [...] So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to. The other thing, is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort." —Shigeru Miyamoto (Shigeru Miyamoto's 'Bad' Game)
- ↑ "You may recall that the opening sequence to The Wind Waker starts off with a mandolin that's played and that's actually sampled from Mr. Miyamoto playing." —Eiji Aonuma (The Legend of Zelda producer talks about the game, the franchise, the past and the future.)