Shigeru Miyamoto's Real Role at Nintendo
Shigeru Miyamoto created Mario, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda. He then came up with F-Zero, Star Fox, Pikmin, Nintendogs, and Wii Sports. On top of that, he developed Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario Galaxy.
At least, that is how he is usually presented online.
If you believe everything that has been written, the picture is remarkable. For forty years, one man supposedly came up with nearly all of Nintendo's biggest games, ran a huge division, served on the board of directors, appeared at trade shows, and still found time to personally review the work of hundreds of developers.
That raises a simple question. What was everyone else doing?
Hundreds of names appear in the credits of Nintendo games. Mario had Takashi Tezuka, Zelda had Eiji Aonuma, and Super Mario Galaxy had Yoshiaki Koizumi. Koji Kondo composed the music, while SRD and other teams handled programming. Yet outside Japan, most players know only Miyamoto.
Let us look at who he really was, and why it is both fair to call him one of the most important developers in history and completely unfair to credit him as the sole creator of almost every Nintendo game.
Vincent Diamante / Shigeru Miyamoto GDC 2007 / commons.wikimedia.org
An Artist Among Engineers
Shigeru Miyamoto was born on November 16, 1952. As a child, he drew, loved manga, and even considered becoming a manga artist. In the end, he enrolled at Kanazawa College of Art, where he studied industrial design.
He joined Nintendo in 1977.
At the time, Nintendo looked nothing like the modern corporation. The company made toys, playing cards, and arcade machines, and was only beginning to work out what could be done with electronic games.
Miyamoto stood out sharply from the people around him. He was not an engineer, could not program, and could not build an arcade machine by himself. But he could draw, create clear and memorable images, and look at a device not as a collection of circuits but as something an ordinary person should want to use.
At first, he was assigned cabinet artwork, promotional illustrations, and simple in-game graphics.
One of the games Miyamoto helped design visually was Radar Scope. It was an arcade space shooter in the style of Space Invaders: the player controlled a ship at the bottom of the screen and fired at advancing rows of aliens.
Nintendo believed Radar Scope would help the company establish itself in the American market.
It was badly mistaken.
Donkey Kong Was Conceived by a Non-Programmer
In 1980, Nintendo shipped three thousand Radar Scope cabinets to the United States. It managed to sell only about one thousand. Two thousand unwanted machines remained in Nintendo of America's warehouse and urgently needed to be converted into something else.
Hiroshi Yamauchi asked the young Miyamoto to come up with a new game.
Sometimes the story is told even more dramatically. Nintendo of America was supposedly in such desperate shape that Yamauchi barely cared whether the American branch survived or shut down.
The difficult position of the American division is well documented. But no reliable source could be found for the claim that Yamauchi did not care what happened to it. Most likely, that detail was added later to make a real story more dramatic.
This really was Miyamoto's big chance. But we should not imagine that he was locked in a room with a screwdriver and emerged several months later carrying a finished Donkey Kong that he had made alone.
Miyamoto could not program. Gunpei Yokoi therefore oversaw the technical side of the project, while the code was written by the contracted company Ikegami Tsushinki.
Miyamoto himself created the characters, designed the screens, and defined the main gameplay situations. He originally wanted to make a licensed Popeye game, but Nintendo could not secure the rights. The sailor, Olive Oyl, and Bluto had to be replaced with original characters: Jumpman, a young woman, and a giant gorilla.
Jumpman later became Mario.
Joshua Driggs / Donkey Kong arcade - zapwizard 34102189 / commons.wikimedia.org
Donkey Kong became a huge success and revealed Miyamoto's defining strength. He was not the person who understood hardware better than anyone else or wrote the most efficient code. His talent lay elsewhere.
He could devise a simple action that made sense without instructions, then build an entire game around it.
You need to reach the top. Barrels roll across your path. The character can only run and jump.
That was enough.
But even Donkey Kong, the game that began the Miyamoto legend, was the work of an entire team. Yokoi helped turn a young designer's ideas into a real game, and Ikegami's programmers made it function.
So the statement “Miyamoto created Donkey Kong” is both true and not entirely true. He really was the project's principal creator and leader. But he did not make it alone.
Who Made Super Mario Bros.?
After Donkey Kong's success, Miyamoto's position at Nintendo changed quickly. He worked on new arcade games and then moved on to projects for the Famicom.
In 1983, Nintendo established an internal division called Research & Development 4. It later grew into the famous Entertainment Analysis & Development, better known as Nintendo EAD.
But even here, other people were working alongside Miyamoto from the very beginning.
He made Super Mario Bros. together with Takashi Tezuka. Toshihiko Nakago and the staff at SRD handled programming, while Koji Kondo composed the music and sound effects.
Nintendo / Nintendo Classic Mini: NES special interview – Volume 3: Super Mario Bros. / nintendo.com
The same was true of The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto defined the central concept, but Tezuka was also the game's director and designer. He designed the world, wrote the story, and continued working on the series for many years.
This creates an odd situation.
When we talk about a film, we have no trouble naming the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and composer. But when the subject is an old Nintendo game, all those people suddenly disappear and only Miyamoto remains.
Part of the reason is that the early games really were made by very small teams. Miyamoto could define the overall idea, draw characters, design levels, and personally inspect almost every detail at the same time.
But games gradually became more complex, teams grew, and Miyamoto himself moved up the corporate ladder.
The higher he rose, the less time he had for hands-on development.
From Director to Executive
Game credits contain titles such as director, producer, general producer, supervisor, and executive producer. They look similar, so players usually pay little attention to them.
But the differences are enormous.
A director manages development day by day. The director makes decisions about mechanics, levels, graphics, and the structure of the game. A producer is primarily responsible for the project as a whole: the people, schedule, development direction, and final quality. A general or executive producer may oversee several teams at once and become involved in each individual project only from time to time.
The last game on which Miyamoto was officially credited as director was Super Mario 64, released in 1996.
By The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, he was credited as producer. Miyamoto himself, however, said that in practice he was “half director and half producer.”
This quote is sometimes attributed to a 1998 interview, probably because that was the year the game was released. But the IGN article was published on June 19, 1997, after E3. The quote itself is accurate; only the date is wrong.
That is an important distinction.
You cannot simply open the credits, see the word producer, and conclude that the person merely signed paychecks and watched the calendar. At Nintendo, a producer could be deeply involved in development.
Especially when that producer was Miyamoto.
The Man Who Upended the Tea Table
Nintendo had an expression: “Miyamoto upends the tea table.”
Developers used it for situations in which he came to inspect an almost finished game, found a problem, and forced the team to redo a substantial part of the project.
It sounds like every developer's nightmare.
During the development of Twilight Princess, staff members said they watched which office Miyamoto was heading toward. If he turned in their team's direction, something would probably have to change soon.
But his method was not to throw away completed work and order everyone to start over.
He usually identified a series of small problems: the player would not understand what to do here, a sound was missing there, or the opening spent too long explaining the controls. One change then led to another, and by the end it seemed as though everything had been rebuilt.
The Twilight Princess developers recalled that Miyamoto paid attention even to the ladder-climbing animation and the wording of individual lines. An email with another suggestion might arrive at night, after the project had already been officially declared finished.
Nintendo / 4. Always Striving to Stay True to the Spirit of Zelda / nintendo.com
So Miyamoto had long since stopped personally conceiving and assembling every game.
But people often draw too sharp a conclusion from this. The logic is simple: Miyamoto is now credited as producer, so he must mainly deal with people and schedules and contribute almost nothing creatively.
Interviews with developers published by Nintendo itself contradict that view.
On Twilight Princess, Miyamoto reviewed individual lines, sounds, tutorials, and the ladder-climbing animation. On Super Mario Galaxy, he regularly checked submitted builds, wrote comments even on weekends, and traveled from Kyoto to the Tokyo team near the end of development.
In other words, Miyamoto really did stop serving as the day-to-day director of most games, but he did not stop shaping their content.
He might not have created a particular character or designed a particular level, but a single comment from him could change the direction of the entire game. His job was no longer to create every element, but to check whether those elements came together into a coherent and engaging whole.
His later role was probably closest to that of an editor-in-chief.
An editor-in-chief does not write every article in a magazine. But they decide what goes into it, demand revisions to unclear passages, and may change a headline at the last moment, altering how the entire piece is perceived.
Who Really Came Up with Pikmin?
The story of Pikmin often begins with ants in Miyamoto's garden.
There is some basis for that. In a 2023 Nintendo interview, Miyamoto said that watching ants inspired the idea of a game in which the player assigns tasks to a large number of creatures. But he immediately added that the real story was more complicated.
That qualification matters. Miyamoto was talking about the origin of one of the main mechanics, not claiming that he saw ants one day and instantly conceived all of Pikmin.
In the same interview, members of the original game's development team explained in detail how the project emerged.
The story was far more interesting.
The original project was started by Shigefumi Hino and Masamichi Abe. They experimented with a group of small creatures controlled by artificial intelligence. Hino worked on the characters and world, while Abe handled the mechanics and level structure. Programmer Yuji Kando tried to make many creatures act at the same time, and Junji Morii designed their appearance.
At first, it looked nothing like the Pikmin we know.
Nintendo / Ask the Developer Vol. 10, Pikmin 4—Part 1 / nintendo.com
The team experimented for a long time but could not combine its separate ideas into a complete game.
That was when Miyamoto joined the project.
He suggested that thrown creatures should latch onto enemies and that defeated enemies could be carried home. Miyamoto then drew a one-page diagram of the entire game: what the player does, why enemies and plants exist, how a day unfolds, and how the number of Pikmin increases.
Once that diagram appeared, the programmers finally understood how the separate experiments were supposed to work together.
This is where Miyamoto's real talent becomes clear. He did not create every character, build the initial prototype, or write the program. But without him, the project might have remained a collection of interesting experiments.
The most amusing part is that the developers of the first Pikmin stated directly that they did not know about the Super Mario 128 technical demonstration and did not use it when making the game.
For years, however, people had assumed that Pikmin grew directly out of Super Mario 128.
So the ant story was not disproved. We simply now understand what it actually referred to. Watching ants helped Miyamoto formulate the idea of controlling many creatures, while Hino and Abe had already started the project before he joined them.
Miyamoto really did play a key role in the creation of Pikmin. But the game did not spring from a single observation or from the work of one person.
And Who Came Up with Super Mario Galaxy?
Super Mario Galaxy has an almost mirror-image story.
The idea of small spherical worlds and shifting gravity had already appeared in the Super Mario 128 technical demonstration. From there, it is easy to conclude that Galaxy grew out of the programmers' work and that Miyamoto was simply given the credit.
The first part is true. Yoshiaki Koizumi led the creation of Super Mario 128 in 2000 and then spent years thinking about how to turn the technology it demonstrated into a real game.
But once again, the real story is more complicated.
According to Koizumi, Miyamoto had talked about spherical platforms for more than five years and repeatedly said that he wanted to see the idea used in a game. But it was Koizumi who assembled a small group of employees and built a prototype in three months: a tiny planet, outer space, and working gravity. Full development began after that.
Koizumi was the director of Super Mario Galaxy. Takao Shimizu was the producer of the Tokyo team. Miyamoto set the initial direction, reviewed builds, and gave feedback.
Nintendo / 1. How Super Mario Galaxy Was Born / nintendo.com
So both extremes are wrong.
Miyamoto did not conceive and develop Super Mario Galaxy alone. But he was not merely an ordinary executive who approved someone else's game, either.
He gave the team a “garden,” as Koizumi put it. The Tokyo developers then grew the game in it.
A Game from the Creator of Mario
There are examples of the opposite kind as well.
In 1996, the puzzle game Mole Mania was released for Game Boy. When it was reissued, it was often promoted as a little-known game from the creator of Mario.
Miyamoto's name really does appear in the credits. He is listed as producer.
But Mole Mania was directed by Masayuki Kameyama. Naoki Watanabe, Eiko Takahashi, and Noriko Aoki handled design, while Yoshiaki Hoshino and Motoo Yasuma handled programming. Pax Softnica also participated in development.
It is not reliably known how much Miyamoto influenced the individual puzzles, characters, or mechanics.
But the phrase “a game from the creator of Mario” sells much better than a list of eight unfamiliar Japanese surnames.
That is how Miyamoto gradually became not only a development executive but also a public symbol of Nintendo.
The Face of Nintendo
Look at the company's old presentations.
Miyamoto walked onstage carrying Link's sword and shield, conducted an orchestra, appeared with the Wii Remote, and personally demonstrated new games. For Western audiences, he became the person who embodied Nintendo's entire creative side.
That suited the company.
Games are made by huge teams, but it is easier for the public to remember one person. Miyamoto had also genuinely participated in the creation of Nintendo's biggest series, which made him far more convincing than an ordinary spokesperson.
The events of 2011 showed just how important his name had become.
During an interview, Miyamoto said that he regularly talked to younger employees about his eventual retirement. He wanted developers to stop waiting for his decisions and learn to take responsibility for projects themselves.
Online, this became the story “Miyamoto is leaving Nintendo.”
The company's share price fell by about two percent, after which Nintendo had to issue a rapid clarification that he was not going anywhere.
Doug Kline / E3 Expo 2012 - Nintendo Press Event - (7640921646) / commons.wikimedia.org
This created a strange dependency. On the one hand, Miyamoto wanted to cultivate new leaders and gradually step back from daily oversight. On the other, Nintendo itself, the press, and even investors continued to treat him as the irreplaceable source of all the company's ideas.
Even though he never claimed to make games alone.
When receiving the Prince of Asturias Award in 2012, Miyamoto specifically emphasized that video game development is a team effort and that he accepted the award on behalf of his colleagues.
Perhaps he understood the problem with his own public image better than anyone.
What Happened After 2012?
In late 2011, Wired reported that Miyamoto planned to leave his previous position, hand major series over to younger developers, and work on small projects.
A very specific picture of the future quickly emerged: Miyamoto was supposedly about to step down as head of EAD, receive a small team, and once again begin personally creating compact games.
Nintendo immediately said that Miyamoto's comments had been misunderstood. By the end of 2012, the predicted departure had still not happened.
Miyamoto continued to run EAD and oversee numerous projects. The real change came only in September 2015.
Nintendo merged Entertainment Analysis & Development and Software Planning & Development into a new division called Entertainment Planning & Development. Shinya Takahashi became head of EPD, while Miyamoto left his role as head of EAD and received the new title of Creative Fellow.
Nintendo itself described a Fellow as an experienced executive who advises the company and guides its work in a particular professional field.
In other words, Miyamoto finally became officially what he had effectively been for years: Nintendo's chief creative adviser.
Another part of the old prediction came partly true in 2016. On Star Fox Zero, Miyamoto was not only producer but also supervising director, and he compared the work to returning to the director's role. But this did not mean moving into a small team that would make compact games.
Nintendo / イルミネーションと任天堂による「スーパーマリオ」の新たなアニメ映画の制作について / nintendo.co.jp
As of July 2026, his official title is Executive Fellow and Representative Director, Member of the Board. But his work has long extended beyond video games.
Miyamoto participated in the creation of the Super Nintendo World areas at Universal parks. He became a producer of the animated films The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, as well as the film based on The Legend of Zelda.
At first glance, it may seem that he has left games behind completely.
But in reality, the nature of his work did not change; only its scale did. Miyamoto once made sure that Mario's movement felt right. Now he makes sure that Mario remains himself in a game, an animated film, and a theme park.
He no longer creates an individual level.
He oversees Nintendo's entire identity.
Epilogue
So is Shigeru Miyamoto's role overrated?
Absolutely.
He did not create Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, or Pikmin by himself. He was not the principal creator of every game that used his name in its marketing. Many of those projects were built by directors, designers, and programmers whom most players have never heard of.
But it would be just as wrong to regard Miyamoto as an ordinary manager who merely walked from office to office and checked schedules.
He could identify the central idea of a game, strip away everything unnecessary, and explain to a team how the individual elements should work together. Sometimes he created a project from scratch. Sometimes he joined halfway through and completely changed its direction. And sometimes he merely asked a few questions that made the developers realize for themselves what they had done wrong.
Miyamoto's greatest achievement is not that he personally drew every Nintendo character.
He established an approach to development within the company in which mechanics should be understandable without instructions, the first minute of a game matters more than an impressive story, and every idea has to work in the player's hands.
He also managed to develop people who continued the work without him: Takashi Tezuka, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Eiji Aonuma, Hideki Konno, Katsuya Eguchi, and many others.
So the right answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Shigeru Miyamoto is not the sole creator of all Nintendo's great games.
But without him, those games, and Nintendo itself, would have been completely different.
