Miyamoto's games - Lakitu's Sachet

"Even just by changing the director of a video game, it will largely change"; so Miyamoto said in an interview in 1998. The director of a videogame is associated with the director of a film, he is the man who holds together the creative vision of the project, who leads him on the tumultuous waves of development, giving orders to orient the ship to the longed port.

The image of Shigeru Miyamoto offers an oxymoron: practically unknown in Japan, where it is hidden from the public eye, almost sanctified in the West, an area where, for many years, Nintendo titles and "Miyamoto's games" "they were pretty much the same. Not only the Japanese company favored this attitude, placing it in the limelight for each production, but the press followed obsequiously: only recently, moving further and further away from development, many journalists accepted the fact that, as important as Miyamoto is, Miyamoto did not necessarily corresponds to Nintendo. Not entirely.

With this article we will try to summarize Shigeru Miyamoto's legendary career as director, not before having clarified some key concepts of his development philosophy.

The design philosophy

A young Shigeru Miyamoto, with Jim Morrison-style hair Shigeru Miyamoto was born in Sonobe in 1952 and studied industrial design at a public university in Kanazawa. For personal contacts of his father, once he has finished his studies, he gets an interview with the Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamauchi: he impresses him with his toys and his graphic ability and is hired by the company as a designer and draftsman.