Shigeru Miyamoto has once again talked about not retiring in his first interview for at least a year.
Keza MacDonald scored the rare interview with the iconic game designer and producer for The Guardian. While Miyamoto talks about many topics, here we will focus on what he said about his own potential retirement. In Miyamoto’s own words:
“More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over. 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.”
For people who have living elders in their families, you will recognize that the first thing Miyamoto mentions here is not something random or to be taken lightly. Many elderly people can immediately lose their mobility, or worse, after a bad fall. We may love to imagine Miyamoto as a sprightly 70+ year old man, but the fear he mentions is real for people of his age.
Outside of that, it is certainly interesting that Miyamoto is already thinking of having one or several successors, but he elaborates on that in further comments below:
“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.”
As we had noted here ourselves, Miyamoto has not really been directly involved in making games for a very long time. Keza managed to find out the little video game related work that he still does do – the elder Mario maker still checks out some early prototypes of games and gives feedback.
In an ironic vein, Miyamoto is quick to make criticisms, but rarely praises his fellow developers. This isn’t because he is a harsh teacher, however – even at this point, Miyamoto is reserved and shy about sharing such praises.
But loyal Nintendo fans may have already noticed that Miyamoto, alongside the late Satoru Iwata, and Nintendo’s still active elder developers, like Takashi Tezuka and Yoshiaki Koizumi, did the work of fostering a new generation of Nintendo developers. These younger developers, such as the staff who made Splatoon, but also the people making their older games, understand Nintendo’s game design philosophy very well, and they are particularly well suited to sustain that philosophy to even more future generations.
It was interesting that Miyamoto’s comment came out mere weeks after Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima shared his own thoughts about not wanting to retire, on Twitter himself. As Kojima put it, he sees creating things as living. But then, Kojima is still a decade younger than Miyamoto, and so his own priorities would be quite different.
It must be said that both, with all the success they deserved, are also quite privileged to get to choose not to retire, and to pursue more work to stay happy and interested in their lives. There’s certainly no lack of other game developers who are no less talented or made no less beloved games, but have become trivia questions or footnotes in the industry (For example, Treasure founder and lead programmer Masato Maegawa). You may not remember their names, but you owe them some of your favorite moments as a gamer as well, and they deserve no less of our adoration and respect.
