Shigeru Miyamoto still has no plans to retire: ‘More so, I’m thinking about the day I fall over’
Nintendo’s creative mastermind has recently been focussing on non-game projects
Nintendo’s creative leader, Shigeru Miyamoto, has reiterated he has no plans to retire from the company.
At 71-years-old, Miyamoto is now in retirement age. However, he has previously insisted he’s not considering ending his career in the near future.
Speaking to The Guardian in a new interview, the Nintendo director again discussed his plans for the future, stating, “more so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over”.
He added: “In this day and age you have to think about things in a five-year timespan, so I do think about who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen.
“I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on. These are things that have already gone out into the world … they’ve been cultivated by others, other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense I don’t feel too much ownership over them any more.”
Miyamoto – who joined the Japanese company from college in 1977 – is best known as the creator of some of Nintendo’s best-selling game franchises, including Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, F-Zero, Pikmin and Star Fox.
In recent years, he has stepped away from hands-on game development, co-producing The Super Mario Bros Movie along with Illumination founder Chris Meledandri, and overseeing the Super Nintendo World theme park attraction.
In The Guardian interview, Miyamoto joked that, considering younger creators have now mostly taken over development of his big franchises, he could one day be forgotten.
“There is a scene in Iron Man where the president goes to his own company and the guard man doesn’t let him in, and he points at the portrait and says: ‘That’s me!’” he said. “But I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”
Last year, Miyamoto was asked what he thought Nintendo would be like without him, when the day of his departure eventually arrives.
“You know, I really feel like it’s not going to change,” he said. “It’s probably going to be the same. There’s, you know, people on the executive team, creators within the company and also people who create Mario, they all have this sense of what it means to be Nintendo.
“And so it’s not like there’s a lot of different opinions that go back and forth. Everyone has an understanding, this kind of shared understanding, of what it is to be Nintendo.
Further reading
Remembering the time I met Shigeru Miyamoto on the Tube as a teenager
“And so even when there’s new ideas that come up, there’s always the fact that it’s a new idea, but also the fact that, is it a new idea that really has the essence of Nintendo or not?
“And I think that’s something that, you know – we have this incredible shared vision, almost a little scary shared vision, about this. So I think there won’t – it’s not going to change.”
