Photo: 文部科学省ホームページ, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Who He Was
Shigeru Miyamoto was born in 1952 in Sonobe, a small town near Kyoto, Japan, where he spent his childhood exploring the countryside, forests, and caves around his home. He studied industrial design at Kanazawa College of Art and hoped to become a manga artist. In 1977, he joined Nintendo, then a playing-card and toy company, as an artist, after impressing the company's president with his toy designs. In 1981, he was asked to rescue a failed arcade game by turning it into something new, and the result was Donkey Kong, which introduced a character who would soon be renamed Mario. Super Mario Bros. followed in 1985 and The Legend of Zelda in 1986, the latter shaped by his memories of exploring the countryside as a boy. Miyamoto went on to create Star Fox, Pikmin, and many other series, and the games he has designed or produced have sold more than a billion copies. He has received the BAFTA Fellowship, Spain's Prince of Asturias Award, and Japan's designation as a Person of Cultural Merit.
Why He Matters
Miyamoto is the designer who showed the world that a video game could be as carefully crafted as a film or a novel. His guiding idea is that a game must feel good in the hands before anything else matters, and his levels are famous for teaching players without a word of instruction. He built the two most influential game series in history not from a background in programming but from a love of drawing, exploring, and play. For young people, he is proof that curiosity about the world around you is raw material for design, and that the best games come from designers who never stopped asking what would be fun.
