Shigeru Miyamoto – 2000 Developer Interview

―Miyamoto, you joined Nintendo at the dawn of the home console era. What was the first work you did there?

Miyamoto: I joined Nintendo the same year that their first home console was released, the TV Game 15 (1977). It was already nearly finished when I joined, but I helped a little bit on the design and coloring of the external casing. I also worked on the case for the Color TV - Racing 112 (1978), and the case for the Color TV - Block Kuzushi… basically exterior design projects. Then, in 1978, Space Invaders came out and it was very popular, and I drew some remixed pixel art versions of those sprites. That was my first time drawing characters. After that I worked on Sheriff (1979) and Space Firebird (1980). In between those projects, I also proposed plans for many different games, but they were all rejected.

―Did you join Nintendo as a designer?

Miyamoto: It was my desire to work in planning, but since I had some design skills, I was given a lot of that kind of work… I sat in the same room as the graphic designers, but given the chance I knew I wanted to work on game planning…

Nintendo was considering obtaining the license for Popeye and making a game with those characters. It would have featured Popeye dodging Bluto's barrels while trying to reach Olive and rescue her. Popeye would start off weak, but if he ate spinach he would temporarily get strong. I drew some mock-up images depicting what I thought the game would look like, and I figured that even if we ended up not being able to get the license, we could just swap out the characters. That was how the basic structure of Donkey Kong was created.

―It's fascinating the different iterations and convolutions a single game will go through before taking its final shape. I imagine that more concrete ideas come to you once you start actually making the game. Could you speak to that process?

Miyamoto: Yeah. For Donkey Kong, first we created a slope for the barrels to roll down. Then that gave us the idea for the ladders, to dodge the barrels. At first, that was the whole game: just climbing ladders. But then I thought, well, if you're able to climb ladders, wouldn't it be nice if you could just directly hop over the barrels too?

The PCBs we had to use for Donkey Kong then were equipped with a joystick and one button. If all you were doing was climbing ladders, you only needed the joystick, but that felt boring to me. We had a hard time deciding whether that button should be used for jumping over the barrels, or for swinging a hammer to break them. The planning docs had the same note written there: "button to be used for jump or hammer".

―Right, I understand the initial motivation for Donkey Kong was to make use of the extra PCBs from America. Necessity and circumstance, in other words, played a big part in its design.

Miyamoto: This is something that hasn't changed for me over the years, but it's in my disposition to be always be thinking of both things: the necessity of circumstance, and the pure game design ideas that will form the core of the game. We're making Majora's Mask right now, and even now, keeping both those perspectives in mind helps me stay invigorated throughout the development.

―Creating games is a synthesis of technology and ideas, after all.

Miyamoto: Yes, and that is why I see game design as an exercise in design. A creator's style and personality are revealed through the details and "finishing" which one applies to that underlying design. Two teams can work from the same planning documents, but depending on the finish they apply, the games could turn out completely different. This quality of game development is precisely why I use the term "game author."

―The authorship appears in the finishing touches, you're saying. To be sure, if planning was all it took, every game would be great. But the finish and polish is what determines whether it'll be a hit, or a flop.

Miyamoto: Well, I can't deny that at the time I was motivated by the simple feeling of "I'm going to make something AWESOME!"

―I've heard that you wanted to be a manga artist when you were a kid. What manga did you like?

Miyamoto: Osamu Tezuka, of course, but also Fujio Akatsuka, Akaki Yamane, George Akiyama, Mitsuteru Yokoyama. I like all kinds of manga, from gag stuff to serious stories. When I was in my third year of junior high school, I wanted to know how beautiful professional drawings were, so I wanted to get my hands on some original drawings drawn by the artists. But nobody gave me any. (laughs)

In the end, I realized that I couldn't compete with professional manga artists, so I decided to just go to college, and consequently I entered the engineering department of a normal high school. But I soon found that just doing the normal engineering courses alone was not very interesting for me, and I also wanted to continue drawing, so I entered an industrial design university. I thought maybe I'd design home appliances.

―Whoa, really? So you wanted to work for a home appliance manufacturer?

Miyamoto: Not necessarily, I mean, that would have been fine, but I also thought kindergarten playground equipment would be fun to design. Essentially, I wanted to make hit products that people could easily interact with! The educational Gakken no Furoku 2 were a perfect match for my hopes. I went to visit Gakken, but I saw a lot of people wearing neckties and… well, it was different from what I had imagined.

―When did you start looking for a job at Nintendo?

Miyamoto: Nintendo was not looking for designers at that time. An acquaintance of my father talked to President Hiroshi Yamauchi, and I was invited for an interview. At that time, Nintendo was making not only amusement machines but also baby strollers and batting machines, and I thought it was an interesting company. I was under the impression that they were making a lot of money from playing cards and hanafuda, so it seemed like they would be open to letting me do what I wanted to do.

―What was your interview with Nintendo like? Did you bring your portfolio of works with you?

Miyamoto: I brought my student works. One was a hanger for kindergarten children. It was a hanger with animal faces on it and a handle, so that even short children could use it easily. There was also a see-saw with a swing attached…

Afterwards, I received a phone call and met President Yamauchi. He was very considerate and said, "I want you to know that we are not hiring you because of the reference, but because we want you to work for us." But get this―after I joined, I found out that they'd applied for a design patent for the hanger I'd designed. (laughs) I mean, I was able to get the patent rights without filing the fee myself, so it was all good. (laughs) I remember thinking, "this is a shrewd company!" But for me, they let me do what I wanted, and I saw them as a generous benefactor or sponsor.

―How did the Donkey Kong project first come your way, by the way?

Miyamoto: When Gunpei Yokoi was working on the Game & Watch, he realized that graphics would be more important in the next generation of games. So he came to my section looking for staff who could draw. I jumped at the chance. So each of us submitted a game plan, and Yokoi picked mine.

―I see, so Yokoi was the one who selected you.

Miyamoto: After that, he continued to consult with me and gave me all kinds of ideas. He had very "unique" opinions, though, so we weren't able to incorporate all of them. (laughs) After Donkey Kong was completed, I heard that it was not well received by the sales staff. But when President Yamauchi finally decided to release it, he called me and said "You did a good job." I was so happy and moved. Since then, I have always considered him my mentor.

―I understand that the design of the main character, Mario, was created by you.

Miyamoto: Yes, that's right. I had confidence in my drawings. The way developments worked at Nintendo then, was that the programmers and hardware designers were in control of the game development process, and from my point of view, their drawings and art was terrible. So, if I was going to do it myself, I had to do that part very well. However, I was a rather analog person and did not know anything about technology. So, I learned how the screen was displayed from an in-house engineer. That's how I started doing pixel art.

However, when I put my sprites onto the TV screen, they were slightly stretched horizontally. You see, the ratio of a TV screen is not an exact square, but 4 to 3. So, I made a piece of graph paper with the same ratio as the TV, drew a circle on it with a compass, and drew a barrel on it. Those were the kind of crude techniques by which Mario was born.

―Mario didn't become the main character until Mario Bros. (1983), but games like that, where two players could play at the same time, were quite rare then.

Miyamoto: There was a famous American game called Joust (1982). I think it was kind of similar to Balloon Fight (1985). You could play against other soldiers on ostriches while flying in the sky. I said, let's make a game like that! and I started working together with Yokoi on it.

―That was also the birth of Mario's brother Luigi, wasn't it?

Miyamoto: You mean the sprite we just color swapped? (laughs) Yokoi wanted to make a game that would be easy for players to understand, which is how Luigi came about.

―Mario's eternal enemies, the koopas, also make their debut here in Mario Bros.

Miyamoto: I was thinking about what kind of enemy would be weak to being knocked over from below like that, and then it came to me: "ah hah! turtles!" (laughs) Then I was out having a drink with sound designer Hirokazu Tanaka and he suggested having them pop out of their shell and flail around after they've been knocked over. That's how the design went, just riffing on ideas with each other like that.

―The original Mario Bros. also established that Mario was a plumber.

Miyamoto: We were trying to think of what other enemies the Mario Bros could have in addition to turtles, and we came up with crabs and flies. So we figured the only environment with all three of those creatures―turtles, crabs, and flies―would be an underground tunnel. (laughs) Some huge underground tunnels that must exist somewhere… like under New York, I thought.

―Hah! Your design process is like a free association game. It must have been a lot of fun working in this way.

Miyamoto: At this point though, we still hadn't thought of the pipes yet. Due to the way the screens worked, enemies that went to the bottom had to re-appear at the top of the screen. So that got us thinking, OK, we need a path or some way for them to get back up there. Then one day I happened to be walking through the streets of Kyoto, and I saw a plastic pipe sticking out of a wall.

―And thus the pipe was born. Despite taking place in New York, the pipes were inspired by Kyoto.

Miyamoto: Well, I'd never been to New York. (laughs) I guess we should say Mario Bros. takes place in a New York-ish kind of place, really. Anyway, finally we got the team together to talk and make sure all this stuff fit together. The first priority, you see, is the game itself―making things consistent is done after-the-fact.

―Mario Bros. went on to be a big hit, and the cabinet could be found all over the country, in game centers and toy stores. Did you ever visit any of those establishments to see it installed?

Miyamoto: Quite often, yeah. One time I saw these frightfully muscled dudes playing Mario Bros together, and that made me happy to see. (laughs)

―Up to then you had always been involved in arcade development, but with the advent of home consoles, I imagine the very way you make games must have changed. The expanded gameplay of Super Mario Bros, for instance, seems like something that could only have happened on a home console.

Miyamoto: The NES opened up a lot of new possibilities, such as making a baseball game with nine full innings, or a mahjong game. But I think Super Mario was still in the arcade vein, where you have to clear four stages before you can move on. I think The Legend of Zelda (1986) was the first game to really break that mold.

―You made a lot of early Famicom games, including Devil World (1984).

Miyamoto: I also ported Spartan X (1985) to the Famicom. It's fun to do a port every once in a while. It's a test of skill to see how close you can get to the original.

―So that's how you honed your skills, I see. For its time, Super Mario was a huge work on a grand scale. Did it take a lot of time to make?

Miyamoto: No, it took eight months. And we were working on Zelda at the same time. We finished the final ROM for Mario in August, and then for Zelda it was January of the following year.

―Was it your intention from the beginning to create a brand new Mario Bros game?

Miyamoto: At first, we were simply thinking about making Mario Bros. with bigger sprites―to show off the capabilities of the new Famicom and all. But about 1/3 of the way through that project, the idea of Mario being smaller came to me. Why not make a world which could accommodate him at both sizes, big and small? If he's small, he can go through narrow places. But what could make him get larger and smaller…? I thought about this for a very long time. Then one day it came to me. "Mushrooms!" The perfect mysterious item. (laughs)

―What a splendid train of association there. There's a surreal, fantasy quality to it.

Miyamoto: The other names for Mario, like "koopa" and "gesso", those are all food names. (laughs) The puku puku fish (Cheep Cheeps in the US) was originally called "tecchiri". But with all the other food names, I thought, maybe that was going a little far, so I changed it. 3

―Super Mario is famous for having a lot of hidden and glitch techniques. The strategy guide "Super Mario no Subete ga Wakaru Hon" was a yearly bestseller.

Miyamoto: About half of those tricks were things we intentionally left in, and the other half were discovered afterwards. I didn't know how the strategy guide thing would turn out, but our goal in adding them was that we thought it would be cool if kids were exchanging info and tips about the game. I had no idea it would lead to this mega-selling strategy guides though. There were very few game magazines in those days. I remember when BEEP, a general gaming magazine, did a feature on Super Mario it was a big deal. "Whoa, BEEP wrote an article about us!"

―Did a lot of those tricks originate in bugs in the game's code?

Miyamoto: Yeah. Several of the actual techniques in the game were originally bugs we discovered during the development. For example, you know the coin blocks that you can hit again and again? That was also originally a bug. Normally when a programmer discovers a bug, he'll remove it right away, but one of the cool things about Nintendo is that we always work side-by-side with the programmers. (laughs) It's easy to check on what's happening. "Hey, this bug looks like it could be interesting. Don't fix it! Let's try and use it somehow." That kind of thing happened a lot.

―You must spend a lot of time with the programmers yourself, then.

Miyamoto: Yeah, I stick close to them. I can't program myself, but I know enough to understand how the games are made and what they're doing. Having some common ground makes communication go a lot more quickly. It also means they can't deceive you. If I hear "sorry, we can't do that", I can propose a compromise: "OK, what if you think about it like this… then would it be possible?" My job, after all, is to make sure we achieve our goals without overburdening the programmers. So I know it may be annoying to them, but I ask a lot of questions. I don't mess with the 3D CG stuff we're doing now, but I do talk with the graphic artists and ask them questions. There's a basic level of understanding you have to have.

―With The Legend of Zelda, the concept of "saving" your game finally became a reality. Now you could create longer narratives. I think it's interesting how Zelda eschewed "experience points" and opted for its own unique system.

Miyamoto: That's mostly because I didn't know much about RPGs. (laughs) At that time, there was an action role-playing game called Hydlide, and that game used experience points. But I didn't want our game to be compared to it, so I wanted to do something completely different. I also personally feel like "experience" is something the player should gain himself; it's not something to be expressed in a number. I felt it was important that the player himself get stronger and better, not the character.

―The concept for the N64 was "visuals you could touch." I imagine you were developing the hardware and software concurrently, but did you take part in the hardware development as well?

―Before the N64 was released, Nintendo was working together with Silicon Graphics on a research project called "Project Reality." Is the N64's existence owed to the fruits of that research?

Miyamoto: We were designing a new graphics chip, but I didn't have much part in that. Our job is figuring out what use to make of it. Since then there's been a lot of talk about next-gen hardware and how powerful your CPU is, and I always wondered, why are we focusing on that so much? What made the Famicom so good, for example, was not the CPU speed but the fact that it had two controllers from the start. Before the Famicom, home consoles were just miniature, simplified version of arcade machines. That's why they all had cheap joysticks for their controllers. But the Famicom came default with two controllers equipped with the Game & Watch's directional pad―it was not an imitation of something else, but a whole new gaming console. It was the real thing. In that same sense, with the N64, I felt like if we didn't challenge ourselves with the controller design, perhaps the whole project would be for naught. It was extremely important, I thought.

―The N64 controller really shines in games like Mario 64 and Zelda 64 where the dedicated buttons make controlling the camera feel so natural, like you're exploring a 3D diorama world.

Miyamoto: That idea for a diorama world goes all the way back to Super Mario Bros. I thought it would be fun to create a space that people could play within and explore deeply. When I was making The Legend of Zelda, I remembered an experience I had hiking, where I reached the peak of a mountain I was climbing and suddenly this huge lake spread out before me. It was very moving.

―Do you ever go to actual real-world locations to help create that sense of reality?

Miyamoto: Making us remember something from our own past―that's what entertainment is, I think. Whether it's a book or movie, the reason people find something moving is because it resonates with an experience they've had themselves. That is why I believe, as creators, if we want to create something new we need to have as many experiences as we can. I'd like to spend more time traveling overseas myself.

―Today it's often said that Nintendo is the Disney of Japan.

Miyamoto: When Disney created Snow White, they invited adults to a test screening. They were trying to see if they could create animation that adults could enjoy, too. After the screening, some adults in the audience had tears in their eyes. They were deeply moved by what they'd seen, and it was then that Disney knew they had succeeded. They were the first to create animation that adults found moving. It's a tough problem that Disney undertook: how do you use children's culture to appeal and speak to adults…? Their answer was not to deliberately try and make everything more "adult". I remember seeing Snow White as a kid, and as a kid I thought it was great. I want to do the same kind of thing with video games.

―According to recent polls, the average video game user is 23 year olds. That tells me that there's no need to focus solely on games-for-adults. It's fine to have them, of course, but they aren't everything. The Mario character, notably, has been accepted by a very wide age group.

Miyamoto: One other affinity I feel with Disney is for the person of Walt Disney. You know, Walt Disney only drew those early, primitive drawings of Mickey… yet he became the face of Disney. I may have created Mario, but I don't make everything in those games―and yet I'm the face of Nintendo. In that sense I'm very interested to see where Nintendo goes from here. It's incredible to me how Disney has maintained and supported Mickey's character across the many decades.

―Compared to Japanese animation, Disney's animation is very smooth and flowing. I feel that Mario and Zelda's movement on the N64 is similarly smooth. Or is that too much of a stretch?

Miyamoto: Well, some of our animators are bonafide Disney experts, and Disney is widely loved by our staff. Disney is always pursuing some new technological thing in every movie they make, but first-and-foremost they always try to make a good movie―and I think that spirit is carried on by our staff. That might be one of the best lessons Disney has taught us.

―The environment that children inhabit today, with video games and cell phones, is very different from the world you grew up in. Do you do product research with children to solicit their opinions and ideas?

Miyamoto: You've brought up a difficult point. We don't do any surveys or research at Nintendo. Although, when we set out to make something up-to-date with the latest trends, we do work together with people who know those trends. However, as regards game creation itself, I think it's perfectly fine to ignore the latest fashions and focus on making something that taps into the things we all share in common. No one ever says "Picasso is out-of-date", right? And a lot of times, what's popular and trending in Japan doesn't interest the foreign markets at all. The fact that I've come this far by ignoring trends has been one of my greatest strengths, I think.

―There's a whole generation of adults who grew up playing your games... we might call them the "Miyamoto Children." Do you ever think about them?

Miyamoto: I don't worry about that very much. But I hear there are children whose entire lives revolve exclusively around games. I'm a little conflicted about that: if they're playing games because they find it easier than challenging themselves to have actual experiences and conversations with other people, then a part of me feels like we should make the games themselves more difficult…

I think imagination is extremely important no matter what you do. I'm always telling my own kids this, to first envision the result you want to achieve, then take action. Kids these days5 spend a lot of time studying process and methods, but they don't think about the results at all. As a result their imaginations are lacking when it comes to thinking about precisely what they want to achieve. They end up blindly acting without having any idea of what they're doing is supposed to lead to. For that reason I believe games need to become something that better stimulates imagination and creativity.

―I see. Your influence on video games extends beyond Japan to the rest of the world. The actor Robin Williams, for instance, famously named his daughter Zelda, and Dennis Hooper accepted the role of Bowser in the Super Marios Bros. movie because his children were Mario fans. I've heard celebrities like Jake Lloyd from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Paul McCartney have sought out your autograph...

Miyamoto: Ah yeah, that's true. I'm very grateful. I think it's very good that Nintendo is headquartered in Kyoto. If we'd been a Tokyo company and focused on the Tokyo market, we might not have had such a global impact. If you only chase what's popular you can lose your sense of direction. So it's very fortuitous we're in Kyoto.

―And Kyoto has those pipes coming out of the walls. (laughs)

Miyamoto: Exactly! Without that, Mario might never have had pipes, you know? (laughs)

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