Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto Reveals Secrets Behind Mario

Miyamoto, who joined Nintendo in 1977, expressed both embarrassment and gratitude at receiving one of Japan’s highest cultural honors, saying he regarded the recognition as an acknowledgment of the many people who had worked alongside him throughout his career.

“Games aren’t something one person makes alone,” Miyamoto said, explaining that he would accept the award on behalf of the large teams that had contributed to Nintendo’s success. Looking back over five decades in an industry that barely existed when he began, he described himself as fortunate to have spent his career helping develop an entirely new form of entertainment.

His work has helped establish Nintendo as one of the world’s best-known entertainment companies, from early arcade titles such as Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2026. More recently, Miyamoto has helped bring Nintendo’s characters beyond video games into films and theme parks.

One of his most revealing recollections concerned the development of the original Super Mario Bros., particularly an unexpected approach to the game’s final confrontation with Bowser.

Miyamoto explained that Mario was fundamentally designed as a character who runs from left to right toward a destination. Rather than introducing a conventional battle at the end of each castle, the development team realized that completing the journey itself could be the basis for victory.

“Super Mario runs to the goal and doesn’t fight Bowser,” he said, describing the original design concept. “It’s a game where you keep running to the right, so why not make reaching the far right the victory condition? Then Bowser just has to fall.”

In the original game, players defeat Bowser by reaching an ax that causes the bridge beneath him to disappear, sending him into the lava below. Mario does not need to engage in a direct fight, unlike the more elaborate boss battles that appeared in subsequent installments.

Miyamoto recalled that finding this solution was particularly satisfying because the team had struggled with how to conclude the stages while remaining faithful to the game’s basic mechanics.

He said later Mario games gradually introduced more direct confrontations with Bowser, but the simplicity of the first game’s solution reflected Nintendo’s approach to game development: discovering unexpected entertainment possibilities within straightforward rules.

The origins of Mario’s gameplay stretched back to Miyamoto’s work on Donkey Kong, when he faced the challenge of making a game’s objective immediately understandable to players.

He pointed to Tetris as an example of an intuitive concept, with falling blocks disappearing when players complete a horizontal row. Donkey Kong, by comparison, required a narrative device to explain why a character needed to travel from one point to another.

The solution was to have a gorilla abduct a woman, giving the player an obvious reason to pursue him. That approach demonstrated how a simple story could make an unfamiliar form of gameplay accessible.

At the same time, Miyamoto wanted to create a game in which the screen continuously scrolled, allowing a jumping character to travel through an increasingly expansive world. The limited technology of earlier games had prevented him from fully realizing that ambition.

The idea eventually evolved into Super Mario Bros., with additional mechanics introduced during development, including mushrooms that make Mario grow larger and allow him to withstand an additional hit.

Miyamoto said the broader innovation was allowing players to experience activities they naturally imagined themselves doing, such as running across landscapes, swimming underwater and flying through the air.

Rather than beginning with an elaborate fictional universe, Nintendo built the experience around enjoyable actions. A recognizable world then emerged naturally from the gameplay.

That emphasis on how people actually experience games has remained central to Miyamoto’s design philosophy.

He recalled a particularly difficult period during Nintendo’s transition from the GameCube to the Wii, when increasingly powerful consoles and more sophisticated games were creating a widening divide between experienced players and people who rarely played video games.

As games became more complex, controllers accumulated additional buttons and functions, making the equipment itself intimidating to newcomers.

Miyamoto and his colleagues questioned whether attempts to make games more entertaining for experienced players were inadvertently excluding a much larger potential audience.

Nintendo responded by simplifying the way people interacted with its products, an approach reflected in the Nintendo DS, released in 2004, and the Wii, launched in 2006.

The two systems helped expand gaming beyond traditional players by emphasizing accessible controls and forms of entertainment that people could understand without extensive experience.

Miyamoto said he was impressed by Nintendo’s ability to deliver sophisticated hardware at relatively affordable prices, regarding that achievement as another important part of the company’s identity.

He argued that game developers have long devoted exceptional attention to the design of interfaces, often considering details that other industries overlook.

Whether players can immediately understand what they are supposed to do, whether characters respond as expected, how quickly the system reacts and how easily mistakes can be avoided are all fundamental design questions.

Miyamoto suggested that the broader technology industry could learn from the way game designers approach human interaction with computers.

He criticized products developed primarily through instructions from management about what should be built, saying such top-down approaches frequently produce systems that are difficult to use.

Instead, designers should constantly consider the experience of the people using their creations.

If that philosophy were applied more widely to computer-based products, Miyamoto said, interactive technology could continue to evolve well beyond conventional video games, creating opportunities for Japanese companies to produce world-leading designs.

The foundation of his own creative approach, however, reaches back to childhood in the countryside around Kyoto.

Miyamoto recalled enjoying the experience of making things and showing them to other people, particularly when his creations surprised or amused them.

Exploring mountains, sliding down slopes, entering rivers and catching fish with his hands left lasting impressions that he believes shaped his approach to entertainment design.

Those physical experiences encouraged him to think about movement, discovery and the pleasure of interacting with unfamiliar environments, elements that later became central to Nintendo’s games.

His background in industrial design also influenced his interest in creating unusual objects that naturally attract curiosity.

He described wanting to make something that might move mysteriously across a table, causing people to wonder how it worked and encouraging them to investigate.

Miyamoto identified originality as one of the most important principles guiding his career.

“When you do the same thing as everyone else, it just becomes competition,” he said, explaining why he has consistently encouraged Nintendo developers to pursue ideas that differ from those of their rivals.

He credited former Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi with reinforcing that philosophy, recalling Yamauchi’s advice that the company should avoid direct fights with competitors and instead concentrate on developing things that others were not making.

The principle anticipated what later became widely known in business strategy as the distinction between red oceans, where companies compete in crowded markets, and blue oceans, where businesses create new markets through differentiation.

Miyamoto also acknowledged the influence of Nintendo developer Gunpei Yokoi, who constantly considered how ordinary objects and existing technologies could be transformed into entertaining experiences.

Together, those influences helped establish a corporate culture in which unconventional ideas and accessibility were often valued more highly than technical competition alone.

Nintendo’s expansion into filmmaking represents a further development of Miyamoto’s thinking about the relationship between games and characters.

He said he had previously resisted the idea of making movies because filmmaking generally requires creators to establish detailed stories, character personalities, family relationships and fictional backgrounds in advance.

For game designers, such predetermined settings can become restrictive when the gameplay itself has not yet been decided.

Miyamoto preferred allowing characters and their worlds to develop from the actions and experiences that made games enjoyable.

Over time, however, he realized that Nintendo’s characters had acquired a cultural presence extending far beyond the games in which they appeared.

Some people, he observed, had become Nintendo fans simply because they loved its characters, even if they rarely or never played the games.

That recognition helped persuade him that Nintendo should become directly involved in filmmaking rather than leaving the development of its characters entirely to others.

The expansion into movies and theme parks reflects a broader shift from Nintendo’s traditional identity as a video game company toward an entertainment business capable of engaging audiences across multiple formats.

Miyamoto also addressed the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence, offering a perspective shaped by his experience of earlier technological transitions.

He recalled an era when designers worked with typewriters and manual production techniques before word processors and computers transformed the way text, illustrations and layouts were produced.

As computers became more capable of handling technical tasks, the mechanical aspects of design became easier, allowing an individual’s artistic judgment and creative abilities to become more visible.

He suggested that generative AI represents another stage in this process.

Miyamoto drew a distinction between the intellectual act of creating something and the practical work required to complete it.

When developing a project, he explained, creators first determine the overall concept, structure and direction. Much of what follows involves filling gaps, organizing details and refining the finished product.

Those later activities can be satisfying, but he warned that the enjoyment of performing them can sometimes obscure whether the underlying idea is genuinely worthwhile.

“The frightening thing is becoming satisfied with the work itself and mistakenly thinking you’ve made something good,” he said.

AI, in his view, may help expose that distinction by automating more of the routine work traditionally associated with creative production.

As machines become capable of writing, drawing, arranging and polishing material, creators will increasingly need to consider what they are actually contributing.

“The more AI takes care of different tasks, the more it becomes an opportunity for everyone to seriously think about what it really means to create something,” Miyamoto said, describing the development as potentially positive.

He argued that designs assembled largely through imitation or copying rarely endure, while work shaped by an individual’s clear creative intentions has a greater chance of lasting significance.

The essential role of the designer, he suggested, is to decide what should exist and why, using available tools to help realize that vision.

Although he acknowledged that AI might eventually become capable of performing far more aspects of the creative process, he believes people still have considerable opportunities to contribute original ideas.

Looking ahead, Miyamoto said his greatest enjoyment continues to come from watching people play with the things he has helped create.

Rather than concentrating on communicating a particular personal message, he is motivated by imagining what might surprise people, capture their interest or simply make them happy.

He said he intends to continue working on several projects, while recognizing that his age means he cannot know how long he will remain actively involved in development.

For Miyamoto, the central pleasure of making games remains unchanged: the people creating them should enjoy the process just as much as the people who eventually play them.

That philosophy, which helped shape Mario nearly four decades before generative AI became a major force in creative industries, remains at the heart of his vision for the future of entertainment.

Source: Television OSAKA NEWS

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