CG Exclusive: Interview With Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto-san talks about Wii Fit, upending tea tables, and why Donkey Kong is so $@#%ing hard.
5/20/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

He's one of the wise old (well, older) men of the medium. His games? Viewed from a certain angle, they seem like so much childish nonsense.

Mushroom kingdoms? Magic ocarinas? Barrel-tossing monkeys?

Yet these seemingly trivial tropes have not only endured upwards of 20 years at this point, they still possess enough juice to make adult men (yes, men who are able to hold down jobs and grow facial hair and have families) regress to the point that they squeal like schoolgirls at a Justin Timberlake concert.

Of course, we're talking about Shigeru Miyamoto. Chances are that even if you don't know who he is, you know the games he has worked on. His contributions not only include Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda series, but also the icons that each of these series gave rise to: Mario, Donkey Kong and Link. At 55, Miyamoto still lives and works in Kyoto, Japan (though Nintendo, fearing for his safety, has asked him to kindly stop riding his bicycle to work).

We recently caught up with Miyamoto-san (along with translator Bill Trinen, with whom we also spoke) on a visit to New York City.

Crispy Gamer: Tell me, did working for Nintendo help you or hinder you when it came to dating?

Shigeru Miyamoto: [laughs] I've been married for a very long time, and, no, my wife never seemed to have a problem with what I do for a living. I guess you should probably ask her that question...

Crispy Gamer: When you first told your dad that you were going to work for Nintendo, did he say, "Son, you really need to get a more respectable job"?

Miyamoto: Nintendo wasn't a videogame company back then. It was focused more on playing cards. Though, yes, it's true, it was still an entertainment company. My father was always great. He always said, "You should be able to do what you want to do." He was very supportive.

Crispy Gamer: Have you actually ever met an Italian plumber?

Miyamoto: No. But, as you know, Mario was originally known as Jumpman, and the landlord of a Nintendo warehouse in New York City was named Mario. So we started calling him Mario, and the name stuck.

Crispy Gamer: Have you seen the documentary "The King of Kong"?

Miyamoto: I haven't.

Crispy Gamer: It's worth watching. One of the facts the documentary taught me is that the average game of Donkey Kong lasts less than two minutes. Why is that?

Miyamoto: Well, obviously, if we'd made the game too easy, and everyone played for 20 minutes on one quarter, arcade owners would not have been happy. [laughs] And I felt that [Donkey Kong] needed to be more challenging than other games because visually, it didn't really change much from screen to screen. You were basically doing the same thing over and over. So, if it was going to keep players playing, it was the challenge that was going to do it.

Crispy Gamer: Is that the essence of your job: keeping players playing?

Miyamoto: I think my job has always been to think about what types of play systems will actually be fun for people. So, if we are talking about the arcades, looking at how the arcades operate, I think it would be my job to figure out, if a player fails at a videogame, what they need to understand about why they failed in order to feel like they want to play that game again. Or for example, if an arcade game is designed in such a way that [the player] does not understand what the goal is, then of course, they're not going to come back to that game. So trying to understand the reaction the game inspires in the player, I think, that was my job. And that's still my job.