Miyamoto turned a Kyoto cave walk into global game design
Shigeru Miyamoto, born 16 November 1952 in Sonobe, Kyoto, joined Nintendo in 1977 after showing toys to Hiroshi Yamauchi. Donkey Kong rescued unsold Radar Scope cabinets; a 1985 Mario platformer and a 1986 adventure epic then made the NES a phenomenon he still shapes as executive since 2002.
As a boy in Sonobe, the son of an English teacher of modest means, Miyamoto roamed the fields, woods and caves around Kyoto, once working up the nerve over several days to enter a cave he had found. He studied industrial design at Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts and hoped to draw manga, absorbing its four-part kishōtenketsu story structure along with Western genre television, until the arcade hit Space Invaders drew him to games. Through a family friend his father arranged an interview with Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, then head of a playing-card and novelty company, and his toy designs won him an apprenticeship in the planning department in 1977.
After drawing art for the arcade game Sheriff, he got his break from a disaster. Radar Scope had flopped in North America, leaving Nintendo with piles of unsold cabinets, and Yamauchi asked Miyamoto to turn them into a new game because, he later joked, no one else was free. Denied the rights to Popeye, he built a triangle of a gorilla, a carpenter and a woman, citing King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Donkey Kong became a hit and won best single-player game at the Arcade Awards in January 1983. Mario gained a brother, Luigi, in Mario Bros., and his overalls and moustache turned him into a plumber.
On the Famicom, known abroad as the NES, Miyamoto favoured play over high scores. Super Mario Bros. in 1985 distilled lessons from Excitebike and Devil World into a sprawling side-scroller, while The Legend of Zelda in 1986 offered an open world of puzzles, a miniature garden recreating his childhood explorations. Games from his franchises have sold over a billion copies, and he has served as a Nintendo representative director since 2002.
Source: Shigeru Miyamoto
