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Shigeru Miyamoto is a video game designer, artist and producer, 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 Legend of Zelda.[1] He joined Nintendo in 1977, where he began developing arcade games. Shortly before starting development for Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto began developing The Legend of Zelda as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System.[2] Since then, he has worked as the producer of every game in The Legend of Zelda series.

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] this due to the limitations of the hardware.[4]
  • Miyamoto played the mandolin in The Wind Waker's title theme.[5]

Gallery[]

Nomenclature[]

TMC Forest Minish Artwork Names in Other Regions TMC Jabber Nut Sprite
Language Name
Japan Japanese 宮本 茂 (Miyamoto Shigeru)

References

  1. "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)
  2. "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)
  3. "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)
  4. "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)
  5. "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.)
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