Home > An EDGE Interview with Miyamoto!
This is an excerpt from an EDGE interview with Shigeru Miyamoto:
EDGE: Games like Mario and Zelda bring such complex webs of tradition with them – is part of the appeal of titles like Wii Fit that you can start with a blank page again?
Shigeru Miyamoto: I don't really feel there are too many differences between the games with traditional frameworks and games with entirely new rules and agendas. In the case of something like New Super Mario Bros. Wii or the Legend Of Zelda series, I know there are certain expectations from the players, which means there will be elements we always have to incorporate. But it's also true that we always need to think in terms of newcomers, too, people who have never played any of the games in the past. So already, everything you have to do in any game has to be visible and accessible to anybody. Whenever we're making these traditional titles, it's not enough just to live up to people's expectations, though, and it's not enough just to build upon something that exists before. So even with Mario or Zelda games, we always have to feature something that's unique and different.
EDGE: On the subject of jobs, a long time ago you said that the hardest thing about work was getting in on time every morning: what's a typical day at the office like for you nowadays?
Shigeru Miyamoto: It's interesting – I can probably roughly divide things into three equal sections. About one third of my working year on average is spent in meetings [laughs]. Meetings of the board of directors, say, or meetings for development. And then I spend probably roughly a third of my time working with people outside of our Kyoto office. We have teams working in Tokyo, for example, and there are also people outside of the company who are still involved in development. Besides that, the final third is spent working more closely on direct game development: I'm talking about internal game and software development. That's working on things like testing prototypes, and looking at the experiments teams might have been working on: I'm particularly interested in seeing how people might react to these things we've been doing, and discussing how we can improve things. And if nothing appears to be working, if there's nothing we can do to get real progress with a project, I have to step in to write down the development sheets and get involved in the planning myself. But I have to make a point for other things. Because I'm often in the office from nine in the morning until ten or even midnight, I make sure that Tuesday evening is free for swimming. I'm busy, you could say, but not as busy as magazine writers [laughs].
EDGE: What sort of innovation do you think Nintendo is bringing to gaming now?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Our basic principle is very clear: we're always trying to be different from everybody else. Many other companies might try to do the same things as someone else who's already been successful in a certain area: they think in terms of the competition, and they think in terms of how they can be better than their predecessor in any established arena. But Nintendo always tries to be unique instead. We always try to be different all the time. Even when we're working on those so-called 'serious' titles, when we're hard at work on a Zelda or Super Mario Bros., amongst ourselves in the same development team, the way we discuss the game is to ask: “What's new? What's fresh about this title?” That kind of focus on trying to be new, to be unique every time, of trying to create something different every time, will be carried on and on and on, so that even when we are working on several other titles, our spirit of trying to be different is always there in the background somewhere.
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