Shigeru Miyamoto, a titan of the video game industry, has built one of the greatest legacies of any game designer through his last 40 years in the business. Despite being 70 years of age, Miyamoto still acts as a Representative Director and Fellow at Nintendo. As the creator of franchises like Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Pikmin which are iconic not just for Nintendo but for gaming as a whole, it’s natural to wonder what kind of changes Nintendo might make to both its games and its overall direction when Miyamoto decides to retire from the world of gaming.
According to Miyamoto, the answer is “it’s not going to.” In a rare interview with NPR, Miyamoto was asked for his thoughts on what Nintendo might look like without his presence. Miyamoto responded:
You know, I really feel like it’s not going to change. It’s probably going to be the same. There’s, you know, people on the executive team, creators within the company and also people who create Mario, they all have this sense of what it means to be Nintendo. And so it’s not like there’s a lot of different opinions that go back and forth. Everyone has an understanding, this kind of shared understanding, of what it is to be Nintendo.
Miyamoto also discussed the importance that everyone experiences “the essence of Nintendo” and its “shared vision” for the future. To some extent, Miyamoto has already shown his belief in these key ideas. While Miyamoto is still playing an active creative role in games like Star Fox: Zero and the upcoming Pikmin 4, Nintendo’s primary titles have been managed and directed by younger talent for quite some time. However, it appears that Miyamoto’s influence will continue within Nintendo for the near future, based on his comments on his enjoyment of his current working lifestyle. When asked which of his video game worlds he would most like to live in, Miyamoto said:
So I really love the work environment that I’m in because I get to engage in so many different things. So it’d be great if, you know, I could be in an environment where I can change the kind of work I do all the time. So I think it might just be my desk or my bathtub.
Nintendo fans can rest easy knowing that it’s clear one of the company’s founding figures has no plans to retire any time soon.