Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto is married to Yasuko and blessed with a son and a daughter.

He likes to play banjo, guitar and mandolin during free time. He is a semi-professional dog breeder and his Shetland Sheepdog Pikku has remained inspiration for Nintendogs.

Shigeru Miyamoto was born on November 16, 1952, in the rural town of Sonobe, located northwest of Kyoto in Japan, to Iijake Miyamoto and Hinako Aruha as their second child.

Little Miyamoto developed a knack for doodling and many a times his studies would take a back seat to this hobby.

He also remained close to nature and would explore natural surroundings in the countryside of Kyoto. Such expeditions including discovering caves and water bodies later motivated him in crafting many of his popular video games, most prominently ‘The Legend of Zelda’.

He started attending ‘Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts’ in 1970 and five years later he graduated obtaining a degree in industrial design.

Prior to embarking on a career in video games, Miyamoto even contemplated a career as magna artist due to his sheer love for the subject.

After obtaining his degree in industrial design, Miyamoto, had an interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of ‘Nintendo’, a Japanese company selling playing cards, toys, games and other novelties. Impressed by the toys created by Miyamoto, Yamauchi inducted him into the planning department of the company as an apprentice in 1977.

Eventually, he became the first artist of ‘Nintendo’ and in 1979 he aided in developing the art of ‘Sheriff’, an arcade video game developed by Nintendo R&D1.

The first game that he helped develop was the cabinet arcade game ‘Radar Scope’ published in December 1979 in Japan and in November 1980 worldwide. The game although thrived moderately in Japan, its overall commercial failure left ‘Nintendo’ on the brim of huge financial catastrophe.

Under such circumstances, he was designated by Yamauchi to transform unsold units of ‘Radar Scope’, large in number, into an entirely new arcade game. This marked development of ‘Donkey Kong’, an early instance of the platform game genre released by ‘Nintendo’ on April 22, 1981.

While conceiving ‘Donkey Kong’, Miyamoto concentrated on formulating a story line first before focussing on technical and programming aspects marking first such instance in development of video game.

Donkey Kong became a huge success garnering immense popularity in the US and Canada and became the top seller of ‘Nintendo’ in summer 1983. It received the ‘Best Solitaire Videogame’ award at the 1983 Arcade Awards (1982).

‘Super Mario Bros.’ was published for the 8-bit home video game console, developed by ‘Nintendo’ in 1983 referred as ‘Nintendo Entertainment System’. The game not only garnered critical acclaim but also thrived in retaining the feat as the all-time best-selling single platform game for around 3 decades.

An IGN poll conducted in 2005 named ‘Super Mario Bros.’ as the "greatest game of all time". It also helped in reviving the crashed video game market of America in the 1980s.