Shigeru Miyamoto - creator of Zelda, Mario and countless other beloved video games - on his Pikmin film, the future of virtual reality, and Nintendo's 'boring' competition
When Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Super Mario Bros. series of video-games, celebrated his 40th birthday, he put away unchildish things. He quit smoking and pachinko, a form of gambling game that combines the brightest, noisiest parts of pinball and fruit machines, took up swimming, and vowed to spend more time in his garden.
“I have never thought of games as a means of storytelling,” he says through a translator, “so while many people have approached me in the past and said ‘why don’t you make a movie?’, I had never been interested.”
“These younger game creators, they want to be recognised,” he sighs. “They want to tell stories that will touch people’s hearts. And while I understand that desire, the trend worries me. It should be the experience, that is touching. What I strive for is to make the person playing the game the director. All I do is help them feel that, by playing, they’re creating something that only they could create.”
“When you play a game, one moment you’re just controlling it and then suddenly you feel you’re in its world,” he says. “And that’s something you cannot experience through film or literature. It’s a completely unique experience.”
“What the other companies are doing makes business sense,” he says. “But it’s boring. The same games appear on every system. At Nintendo we want an environment where game creators can collaborate and think of ideas for games that could have never happened before.”
As to whether Nintendo are developing a more elegant version of the technology, his lips are presently sealed. “I have nothing to tell you about Nintendo’s involvement in virtual reality. We have nothing to announce yet,” he says.
Our time is up, and we make our way to the Toho Cinema complex across the road, where Pikmin Short Movies premiere is taking place. The films are bright and sweet, with an Aardman-like sense of mischief: what’s most impressive is the ingenious way in which the abandoned digger is reimagined as a sprawling, three-dimensional landscape for adventure.
Afterwards, the assembled critics and journalists give the film a warm round of applause, but for Miyamoto, who takes to the stage, it’s clear that something is missing. “You were all very quiet,” he says. “I was hoping to hear more laughter.” Then his eyes scan the crowd, sitting with notebooks on laps, and he smiles to himself, having identified the problem. “Perhaps we needed more children here,” he says.
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