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Get up to 60% off at babble.com-imaginary. Spell-ba-b-b-e-l.com-slash-imaginary. Rules and restrictions may apply. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend their disbelief. I'm Eric Belinsky, here with my assistant producer Stephanie Billman. Hi. See, I don't think people realize how hard it is to convince you to get on a microphone. Like, there have been many times that I've wanted you to come on and you're like, no, I don't
think so. But this time, you said yes. In fact, I think it was your idea to come on the mic. So tell us who are we talking about today? Who is Shigeru Miyamoto? He's universally acknowledged as the first video game designer, not the engineer, but the person who actually thought about the user experience when it came to video games. And as common as that is today, back when he started at Nintendo, that was pretty much unheard of at the time.
But I remember when you first found out about his story and he started learning about him, it was like the ultimate comfort food for you. Like, why did you find learning about him so relaxing or so inspirational? Well, as you know, I found out about him. I was recovering from COVID and I was also
going through some personal things that were pretty tough at that time. I kind of needed a way to not necessarily turn off my brain, but you just to find something that gave me like this little bit of, but when I'm sick or you know, when I'm just not feeling
well, I really like to look at pop watch pop culture documentaries. This story starts to unfold and I discover that he's not only responsible for one or two, but three Nintendo video games that pretty much helped create Nintendo as we have it today. Yeah, because I always thought of Nintendo as just this big corporation like the other
game studios like Electronic Arts or Epic Games or Rockstar Games. I just the idea that there's a singular artist with a creative vision, you know, behind some of these pop culture icons was really surprising. Yeah, there are people who love the legend of Zelda, their friends who love the legend of Zelda. And you know, I spoke to them and they had no idea who he was or that he created these other games as well.
Well, I mean, it's funny because when we've talked about the fact that like my taste in video games is the opposite. I love these games where everything is a choose or an adventure, but the the choices are all horrible and I'm kind of massacistic about like I there's one game I played where I all the characters end up with really bad endings and I replayed it to give them better endings. And I unlocked more horrific endings for these characters
that I ever knew as possible. And I found it incredibly cathartic, which is like the opposite of how you play games. No, like I prefer like creating world or creating like my own little wife and just exploring and I can go in and I can just create my own little perfect world, perfect, you know, island. And it's a way to to kind of tap into a sense of wonder and a sense of play. And especially at a time where I wasn't feeling, no, didn't have that sense of wonder about me or about
my life. That's where it's just like this sucked me in. This is personal to me. And then I harassed you until you let me do that. Well, no, I mean, I've had a really interesting to learn about him and he actually has a great origin story. So I talked with Sam Saroi. He teaches communications and video games at Oakland University in Michigan. And he says way before Miyamoto was a game designer back when he was a kid.
He's kind of like a dreamer and he spent a lot of time in his imagination playing near this cave near his home. His dream is actually to be a manga artist, right? And so that's what he trained for. He was an artist and he couldn't make it as a manga artist. And his not that he was a bad artist is just he was one of so many darn kids wanting to be a manga artist. So he drifts from place to place. His dad happens to know the then president
of Nintendo. So his dad helped him get a job at Nintendo. This is 1977. Nintendo was not the family friendly entertainment company that we know today. Nintendo was a playing card company. They got their start making Hana Fudakards, which is a type of traditional Japanese playing card. And because of that Nintendo itself kind of got wrapped up with the Yakuza and you know and organized crime and trying to excise itself from that.
Jennifer DeWinter is a dean at Illinois Institute of Technology. She's taught video game development in the US and Japan. And so Nintendo becomes a taxi company. It becomes a love hotel company. It becomes a instant rice company. It becomes a graphic company. It becomes an object development company. Right. So industrial design. So Nintendo is this sort of like weird aimless company not too different than Miyamoto as this aimless kid. Nintendo was also making electronic
games and toys among many other things. But that is not where Miyamoto lands. He starts designing things like hangers for children and other household items. And then he has this kind of like pulling the sword from the stone kind of moment. In 1980, Nintendo was getting into the market of arcade video games. And they released a game called Radarscope.
I don't know if you've ever played it. It's a pretty run in the mill boring game. It's in a saturated market kind of doing very similar types of things of just firing stuff. It actually looked like a combination of two other games, Galaga and Space Invaders. And Radarscope, you have a gun at the bottom of the screen and you're firing at spaceships coming down from the top of the screen. The game was a flop in the US and they were stuck
with thousands of units. And since my childhood is now a historical era, I know I have to explain to some listeners that way back then, games were in these arcade cabinets that people played standing up. And then 10 note didn't want to waste thousands of perfectly good arcade cabinets. There was expensive hardware on them. It's much cheaper to just put a new game into these cabinets, but they're busy. This
company is really busy. And so rather than saying, okay, our video game division because like that doesn't really exist in the way that we understand it now, go design this thing. They just open it up to the company as a whole. Like someone come to us with a design that will retrofit these cabinets with a new game. For a long time, the story was that Miyamoto was given this assignment. Any joke that nobody else was available. But it's possible he was being modest because more recently Nintendo
was said, it's not true. There was a contest. And this was Miyamoto's proposal. He wanted to make a pop-up game, but they couldn't get the rights to pop-up. So he thought, what if I switch out Brutus with King Kong or some kind of big gorilla and olive oil could just become a damsel in distress? So then you have this scrappy young man, a princess and a King Kong sort of thing, Donkey Kong. They go with Miyamoto's design for Donkey Kong, but he is very limited experience working
in video games. So they assigned him a mentor, Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi was a brilliant designer. He developed an early handheld gaming device called Game and Watch. It was a progenitor of the Game Boy, which is something that Yokoi also helped to develop many years later. Yokoi already has this very successful career under the idiom. Don't keep on trying to get
into the arms race of new hardware development. Just use old hardware that people consider dated and adapt it to new and surprising means, and that's the way that you'll enter this market. So you can see how that philosophy lends itself well to retrofitting radar scope. The console on radar scope had a joystick and a button, a button to shoot things. Sam says at first, they didn't know what to do with this button.
Miyamoto says, why don't we make it a jump button? By adding this jump button, he changed the gameplay. Back then, a lot of video games were pretty static. But because of the way they were using the joystick and the jump button, there was now an upward movement to Donkey Kong. And when the next screen loads, you're presumably on the next floor. So there's now a greater world outside of the static screen. It's also very Miyamoto in terms of his philosophy.
He took the firing mechanism of a weapon, and turned it into something more playful. The ability to jump. Jennifer says this was literally a game changer. I don't like using the word game changer because there's actually so few of these in the media industries. We always say try to ensure with a twist. Like if you have something radically
new, like often it will fail in the market. This one's a game changer because all of a sudden, it comes off of the mechanic as the selling point and into the narrative structure as the selling point. All of a sudden, we see a shift in games coming off of this into character-driven game design. In fact, Miyamoto has said, quote, before Donkey Kong, those who are making the video games with the programmers and engineers, not the character designers and other artists.
It's funny, even today in the university setting, you have this tension between where does video game development belong? Is it belong in a computer science and engineering? Or is it belong in the social sciences and humanities? And the reason why that's possible is because Miyamoto single-handedly proved that artists and creative types can make video games. He created the concept of a video game developer, a video game designer.
Donkey Kong was such a success. Nintendo changed their whole business strategy. Nintendo could have easily become a love hotel chain. It could have easily become a children's hangar development company. It could have easily become one of many other things that it was. And so then they buy and large abandon all their other activities. So gone are all the toys, right? Gone are all all those other things and now they are
making video games. Yeah. A huge hit like Donkey Kong would have been enough to cement his legacy in the industry, but Miyamoto was far from done. He was about to eat a mushroom and double in size. That actually makes a lot more sense if you've played this game. But material may be inappropriate for children under 13. You might have noticed I haven't talked about Mario yet. When Donkey Kong was released in Japan, he was still called Jump Man. He didn't get the name Mario until the game was
rebranded for American consumers. The spin-off game Mario Brothers came out in 1983. Super Mario Brothers came out in 1985. That was a much bigger deal. Super Mario Brothers was full of technological leaps, literally and figuratively. And Jennifer says Miyamoto learned a valuable lesson when he was developing those games with his mentor, Yokoi.
In fact, there's this really famous conversation between Yokoi and Miyamoto where Miyamoto doesn't want Jump Man to be able to jump far beyond what physics allows versus when you compare it to the original Donkey Kong. Yokoi goes, look, you're trying to go for fidelity into what people could actually do. And that's dumb. What you need to go for is this weightless experience because the mechanics should meet the experience that you're trying to get.
Remember when they were retrofitting Radar Scope into Donkey Kong and they turned the shoot button into a jump button? Well Sam says the jump mechanic in Super Mario Brothers was just as innovative because it allowed you to move laterally through the narrative. Super Mario Brothers is a side-scroller game. In other words, the game is scrolling from left to right,
introducing new characters and backgrounds as you keep moving. Miyamoto and Yokoi did not invent the side-scroller, but Sam says Super Mario Brothers set the standard for the side-scroller game. That was also groundbreaking, though with the game taught you how to play it. Super Mario Brothers was such a huge success, particularly as a home video game. It revitalized the entire video game industry in the US, which had been cratering. Sam teaches Super Mario Brothers in his game design
classes. The solutions they came up with at Nintendo is still the solutions I teach my students today. Anything that Miyamoto can be an inspiration to indie game designers because the technological limits of the 1980s are similar to the limits that low-budget indie game designers have to deal with today. A lot of the characters are made of similar shapes as well, and this allowed them to create a more expansive world with fewer resources. And Jennifer says the innovations in his early
games were not just technological, they're a thematic as well. So Donkey Kong, if the experience is trying to relive the narrative structure and the sort of rising action experience of a King Kong movie or the sort of humorous fighting that you get in a pop-eye thing, when you move over into Super Mario Brothers, what you get is the experience of playgrounds. And that's what Miyamoto is
super interested in doing. And so you can feel that immediately, like you understand that he's doing playgrounds once you say it out loud, because not only do you have like this free jumping that defies physics, you've got the sliding mechanic, you have the exploration mechanic, you have the climbing mechanic, you have the squatting and discovering new world's mechanics, right? So it's all that sort of
childlike exploration. He's also one of the first video game designers to incorporate his personal experiences into his games. That's even more true with the Legend of Zelda, which came out in 1986. Everyone sort of thinks about Mario as in the sort of that is Miyamoto's shining glory. I disagree. I think Zelda, I think Zelda is the canonical game that launches game development into this into the stratosphere. Zelda is not the main character of the Legend of Zelda. She's
another damsel in distress. The main character is Link, who looks like a little elf warrior. But the medieval fantasy world didn't interest Miyamoto as much as the gameplay. At the same time that he's doing Super Mario Brothers as an exploration of childhood joy at playgrounds, he's doing the Legend of Zelda, which was his personal childhood joy of cave exploration and
moving around a forest. And once you kind of see that there are different aspects of childhood and exploration, you can see how they diverge in pretty significant ways while still by and large being about his own personal experiences in his own childhood. Because remember, he was this bookish kid kind of lonely who spent a lot of time in his imagination
outside at a cave. There was a cave near his house that, you know, as a kid, he was really scared of but was drawn to, I think we can sort of safely say that that's the cave that you encounter. And in Zelda, that cave is the thing that launches us into the adventure. The Legend of Zelda is not an open world game as we think of them today where you're dropped into a digital landscape and your character can wander around and explore like its virtual reality.
That technology did not exist back then. But Zelda is the progenitor of all of those games. It's literally trailblazing in the amount of agency that you had to explore this world. You're rewarded for finding caves and going into it. You're rewarded for opening things. You're rewarded for finding hidden rooms. You're rewarded for all of this stuff that under that typical sort of game of point A to point
being killed as many things as you can. This is a really early game in which it's trying to get you to explore and how that sort of joy of mystery embedded throughout the entire game. You can move linearly through it, of course, but it's all about did you discover a warp tube? Did you discover the vine that will take you into the sky levels? Did you get to swim? But Sam says Zelda was a tough cell for the top executives at Nintendo.
And literally, it's one of those I want to be able to have the sprawling story. You know, he got pushed back from that. It's like, okay, if it's sprawling, you know, your story's too large, Miyamoto. How does anybody going to play this game in one sitting? You know, his answer, you don't. You save it at these locations. How do you save it when you hit the button? It's off. It's over.
In the mid-1980s, the idea that you could save your progress in a game was cutting edge technology, especially for a game that was going to be this complex. Technically, how they got around that law physics was that they added a battery, a small coin size battery that supply just enough current to keep your safe position alive. When you play Super Mario Bros., you're in a rush to make it through all the levels without dying.
But if you can save your progress in Zelda, you can be more methodical as a player. And the game design can be more opaque. The game explicitly doesn't handhold you. In fact, one of the earliest critiques that he got, he got summoned in front of the present and Nintendo, who pretty much told him it's too hard, make it easier. Handhold the player a little more because people are getting frustrated and no one's going to want to buy this game. And he does the most baller thing ever. He goes, no.
In fact, I'm going to make it harder. In fact, I'm going to make it so hard. I'm going to take away your sword. In the very beginning, you start off with no sword. And in fact, he kind of shuddles you into this cave and you have this strange man, as something says, something along lines of, is dangerous to go it alone. Take this, you'll need it. It's a message that says, this game is a game that you have to play in stages. This game is a game that you have to play by talking to other people.
The only way that you can figure this out, the only way that Eric can figure this out, is if Eric and Sam play it together at the same time and talk about it or talk in their social circles and strategize together, it's meant to be hard. He makes it harder to force players to talk to each other. Isn't that beautiful? As Miyamoto became more successful at Nintendo, he moved up the corporate ladder,
jumping over barrels and fireballs, until he made it to the top level. Up there, he oversaw a lot of projects, including the continual upgrades of Mario and Zelda with every new console. He wasn't making as many games, but he was still able to impart his philosophy on the games that Nintendo made, and the way we play games today. Hi, I'm Daniel, founder of PrettyLitter. Cats and cat owners deserve better than any old-fashioned
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for details. I talked before about how Miyamoto had this kind of pulling the sword from the stone moment when he came up with Donkey Kong. Well, he later becomes more of a merlin character, a mentor. In the early 1990s, he found a protege, and a young designer, named Satoshi Tijiri. They were kindred spirits. Tijiri also loved outdoor play when he was a kid. In fact, he used to collect bugs. He had an idea for a video game where you collect these little monsters called
Pokemon. The story goes, he happens to wander in on Satoshi Tijiri, pitching the idea to the president of Nintendo, the president at that time of Nintendo, and they hate it. They hate it. Tijiri himself is this remarkable kid that same sort of dreamer type of kid like Miyamoto was. Miyamoto pulls Tijiri after being after Tijiri was told no, and like, okay, thanks for coming. Leave please. Walking Tijiri out the door, Miyamoto says,
hey, that pitch was terrible. But let me help you make it better. Tijiri didn't work for Nintendo. He had his own fledgling company, and he wanted Nintendo to distribute his game. So Miyamoto did not have to help this guy, but he convinced Nintendo to approve the project, and he worked with Tijiri over the next six years until the video game was ready to
launch. He also introduced Tijiri to his mentor, Yokoi. With group projects, it's sometimes tough to piece together who had which idea, particularly because the three of them had the same philosophy. They were all interested in the social aspect of gaming and reusing older technology. From what I've read, it looks like it was Tijiri's idea to use the Game Boy, which at that point was kind of on its way out. There was a cable which connected Game Boy's, and he wanted to use that
cable to allow players to exchange Pokémon with each other. Miyamoto helped him refine that concept into two versions of the game that they would release simultaneously, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue, which both came out in 1998. Instead of releasing one game, release two games, two copies of the same games where people would collect these bugs, these Pokémon, you know, each version has a unique set of monsters you can connect a collect and you could share them with each other using this cable.
I actually didn't know that Pokémon started as a video game. I knew about the card game in the animated series, which came out around the same time. Jennifer says it was all part of Nintendo's media mix strategy. This media mix strategy of this part of the media franchise is going to give us this part of the experience. This part of the media franchise is going to give us this other part
of the experience. So then we get the narrative structure out of the comic and the anime series, and then that takes off in a very significant way, and then we get the physical collecting mechanic in the card based series. And so you get two places where the narrative happens, and then two places where the mechanic happens. There's a lot at stake for Tijiri. If he failed to
deliver Pokémon, he would have been a disaster for his company. So Jennifer says we have to qualify Miyamoto's success with the fact that he was part of a corporate structure at Nintendo. Or to use the visuals of Mario Kart, if he drove off the road, a little guy in a cloud could come by with a fishing pole to rescue him. Then he gets much more power, and then we start feeling seeing like the edges of his ideas, right? So think about when the Wii first comes out, and he creates
the music game. And it's boring. It is not good. He's trying to gamify something that actually takes people years and years and years of mastery. In fact, he himself is a musician and knows that it takes years of mastery, and that there's no way to turn it into something that's fun without all of that mastery. And so we've got instances of him failing, and he's humble. He's like, yeah, that was a bad idea, but there's enough good ideas to kind of carry through.
Moving into a supervisory role was a challenge for Miyamoto. Product launches that he oversaw were delayed because he was such a perfectionist. Games that he was directly involved in were critically acclaimed, but they had lackluster sales, possibly because he was spread so thin. Although he did find success in the casual game market, when he developed the Wii Fit. Miyamoto is still the company. These days, he's more focused on entertainment.
He produced the Super Mario Brothers movie last year, which made over a billion dollars. He's also developing Nintendo theme parks in Japan, California, and Florida. One of the things that Sam likes about Miyamoto's career is that his work often doesn't fall into the gatekeeping culture in video games. There's a big debate around who gets to call themselves a gamer, but it wasn't always that way. Video games in the early days, everybody played them.
Boys, girls, old young, and eventually when the home console market came, and this whole who is a video game four, who's a video game four, it started to slide more into boyhood. Today, let's be fair, right? Videos today still has that veneer that it's a masculine endeavor. It's for boys. But if you take a look at Miyamoto's games, it wasn't like that. Jennifer thinks that's because Miyamoto didn't set out to be a game designer.
He just discovered that video games could be a great medium for personal expression. If you look at his games, you can see the core experience tracking with his hobbies through his life. And so his early game design time, he was designing games as he understood it for children. So all of them are pulling from his memories of being a child and the experience of that, not the narrative structure of it, the experience of it.
Then you get peak mean coming out in response to him discovering a love of gardening. And so the core experience is around like his joy of gardening. You get we fit around the core experience of like him aging and needing to get fit. Each stage of his life, he's translating his hobbies into his games. He often gives talks to aspiring game designers in Japan. And he says, I don't want to hire people who grow up playing games.
I want to hire people who have like interesting experiences that they can pull from. Because otherwise we're just derivative. Stephanie, one of the big questions that I keep thinking about with Sam and Jennifer is the idea of what is play. Like what counts as a game. And you and I talked earlier about how you and I have very different taste in games and what we enjoy playing. I mean, do you think that's part of his legacy is that he's been pushing the boundary of this idea? Oh, absolutely.
And not only just pushing the boundaries, but he did so in this really unexpected way. You can gamify pretty much anything. My sister likes to play Farmville because she can't actually grow a plant, but she likes to pretend she can in this virtual world. So he kind of helped to redefine who should who could play games. And I absolutely know without him the games that I play would not exist. Or if they did, it would have come out much much much later and have been much different.
Yeah, it's funny. Actually, I asked Jennifer if me and moto's father had not helped him get a job at Nintendo in the 1970s, what would video games look like without him? It's a less childlike wonderous space, right? So look at the games that come out prior to me and moto and even actually right around the moto. They're mostly militaristic games or maze based games. What me and moto brings us is instead of like getting competition as your primary mechanic, how do you make wonder and joy
your primary mechanic? And so just look at recent Zelda games, for example. Of course, we still have two defeat Ganon, which remains like this constant reminder on the horizon of my game. But the things that bring people real joy in that is like how beautiful it is to move around that landscape, like writing the horse or finding a cool cave or whatever. And we haven't lost that in Miyamoto games. And we don't see anything quite to that level in any other game.
But can we look at sort of the way that games exist now and just say like, you know, if it weren't for these innovations, this game would probably not exist. Sure, name a game. Like just name any game. Red Dead, Redemption. Wouldn't exist without Zelda, right? Little big planet. Wouldn't exist without Super Mario Brothers. Any side scroller, the side scroller becomes the mechanic thanks to Super Mario Brothers. Oh, Animal Crossing, but you know, there's Gan that wouldn't literally wouldn't exist
without him. Sure. And Miyamoto has a producing role in that, right? So if you want to talk about what would the world look like without Miyamoto, we wouldn't have Animal Crossing. That would not exist without Miyamoto, right? Like female designed game, both men and women play this game, becomes like this big deal in the pandemic, of course, because like it's charming. But in fact, you can watch people play side by side Animal Crossing, even though they could do it remotely.
And so from the early days, he understood that the arcade cabinet was a social space, even if one person is playing, he has held that together for 40 years and understands a tiny handheld device as a social space, even if one person is playing. So, so as you mentioned earlier, you're one of the people that really fell in love with Animal Crossing during the pandemic. And one of the reasons you love this topic is because Miyamoto creates these worlds that feel
very cozy and comfortable or safe. But it also does get to something that I wrestle with sometimes at a personal level, just in general, which is how healthy is it to retreat into a fantasy world when the real world needs our attention? The world is a mess right now. You have a tendency to you personally even have a tendency to like doom squirrel social media. And we all do. But at some point, there's going to be this fatigue, you know, I worked for quite a while in activism and
the activism industry. That was one thing we were worried about constantly when it came to our employees, activism fatigue. Should you hide your head in the sand and ignore what's going on around you? Absolutely not. But you can step away for a while and that helps you find a reminds you of why you're fighting in the first place. Well, that's really interesting. You're saying that because I was thinking about like, so Jennifer said earlier, you know, a game like Red Dead Redemption,
which it's an open world Western adventure game. It wouldn't exist without the Legend of Zelda. And you can play Red Dead Redemption on a Nintendo console. But Nintendo wouldn't make a game like that. Miyamoto is often compared to Steven Spielberg, but Spielberg did move beyond doing just family friendly entertainment. Would you want Miyamoto to make games that have more adult content or moral nuance? Absolutely not. We have a lot of great video game companies who make more complex,
like morally complex video games, games that have a mature adult rating. But Miyamoto seems to have a way to tap into our sense of childhood wonder and play. And not only that, his games encourage us to share our experience with others. He reminds us of how we like to play as a child, but he also bring brought us, you know, these other things that as we grow up, the interests that we find and
the safe spaces that we create, he helped us find those as well. You know, the pandemic was just really hard on me, but Animal Crossing was one of those things that helped connect me and make me feel safe. Giving that sense of play, that sense of wonder, that sense of your safe to explore your environment in this scenario. That's what I think his legacy is. I think another part of his legacy is the idea that you can bring a sense of play to anything.
You can even bring a sense of play to aspects of adulthood that maybe don't seem very playful. And to paraphrase an old saying, it's not about how you win or lose his games. It's how you play. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Sam Saroy and Jennifer DeWinter. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout-out on social media, leave a review, or if you get your podcasts, or tell a friend you think would like
the show. The best way to support imaginary worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspotcast.org.
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