There are many things in this life that are inevitable. Many of them are grim things we don’t want to discuss, like taxes. However, some are a natural part of life that most people will embrace—for example, retirement. If you are lucky enough to have saved enough and done a certain job long enough to enter retirement, you’ll be able to cash in on a pension and potentially live the rest of your days relaxing and doing things you never had the chance to do before. One person thinking about the future in that way is Shigeru Miyamoto.
Miyamoto has been a part of Nintendo for forty years. He was there during their bid in the arcade wars and was the man that helped make the NES a success with various titles from his imagination. Even now, with the Nintendo Switch, you can feel his influence and see the franchises he built up all over the place, including titles like Pikmin 4 coming out this year.
Given that, it’s hard to imagine what Nintendo would be like without Shigeru Miyamoto. He was a pillar of that company’s gaming division, and many owe a lot to him. However, in an interview with NPR, Miyamoto said that he doesn’t feel like it will change that much at all:
“You know, I really feel like it’s not going to change. 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. 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.”
That’s a sage way of thinking about it. Miyamoto himself has admitted that he’s taken a “step back” from his leadership role for years, and new voices have popped up as a result.
So while Nintendo will miss Miyamoto when he’s gone, there’s plenty to keep The Big N going strong.
