Meet the man who invented Mario : Shigeru Miyamoto

Mario, Wii Fit — what’s next for Nintendo?

Shigeru Miyamoto is the man responsible for many of Nintendo's best selling games, from Mario to Zelda. What's next?

There is a story about Shigeru Miyamoto, the head of design and development with Nintendo. When you meet him, it is said, you are free to discuss all the characters and games he has created, from Mario in the late 1970s to the Wii Fit of today. His private life, however, is completely off limits. 

Not that the 57-year-old Miyamoto has anything to hide. He lives with his wife and two children in Kyoto, near the Nintendo HQ. He breeds dogs. There are no skeletons rattling in his closet.

The reason for the secrecy is that Miyamoto’s private life has a way of emerging in his work. When he bought a puppy he was so intrigued by the interaction between his family and the animal that he created Nintendogs, a dog-rearing game. It has sold about 25 million copies worldwide.

“Yes,” he admits, “ my hobbies have a habit of surfacing in the work I produce. Most recently, as I got older, I started worrying about my weight, weighing myself every day and talking about it with my family. It made me think that perhaps health could be a subject for a game.”

The result was Wii Fit, a balancing board for the Nintendo Wii console that monitors your weight and centre of balance and suggests a tailored exercise programme. It, too, has sold more than 25 million copies.

Clearly, the details of Miyamoto’s life are big business. But it’s not all about sales. He is in London to accept a Bafta fellowship at tonight’s Bafta awards for video games. The award is a belated recognition of the influence of a man whose Super Mario games for Nintendo have created a gallery of characters as familiar to today’s youngsters as Mickey and Minnie Mouse were to their parents.

“I’m always a bit uneasy about accepting awards like this,” Miyamoto says. “I’m not a novelist. Video games are not created by one person alone. Also, when I look at the past recipients of this award, such as Alfred Hitchcock, I doubt whether I deserve to be in that sort of company.”

Such humility is characteristic of the annoyingly youthful-looking Miyamoto, dressed for our meeting in jeans, T-shirt and blue velvet jacket. Though on one level he is the personification of the Japanese corporate ethos, on another he’s still the scruffy 25-year-old who fluked his way into Nintendo in 1977.

The story of Nintendo’s rise from a Kyoto-based manufacturer ofhanafura (children’s playing cards) began when, with the company facing bankruptcy, its president turned to Miyamoto to invent a game that might work on a failed arcade machine. Donkey Kong, starring a carpenter — his plumbing days were in the future — called Mario, was born.

“There is no way I could imagine it ever becoming such an international company,” Miyamoto says. “But at no point have we sat round and come up with a corporate strategy for expansion. Everything we have done has been done gradually, organically. If you ask me what the biggest surprise is, it’s that I’m about to receive this prestigious award. I’m an industrial designer.”

Surely he must take some pride in what his work has achieved? “In the Wii console we brought games into the living room and made them for the whole family. At the moment I am more interested in expanding the video game experience, using games to visualise things such as health that are not normally easily visible.”

What will he do with his free time in London, I wonder? Study the answer that follows carefully. There might be a multimillion-selling video game lurking in it. “The thing that fascinates me about Europe is how old everything is. I love looking at the details of buildings. I look at the intricate carvings and I can imagine them being made by one man, tap-tapping away as part of a huge team of people who gradually constructed these huge churches or cathedrals. They must really have been motivated by love for God or their work.” Or perhaps, by a particularly clever boss.