Word: miyamoto
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Nearly as unlikely as the Wii's world-beating success is that of the man behind it. A self-professed doodler from a rural town outside Kyoto, Miyamoto once dreamed of becoming a puppeteer, which may help explain the leisurely five years he spent earning his degree in industrial design. His dad got him in touch with reality in 1977 by calling a friend--who happened to head Nintendo--and landed Miyamoto his first job, as a staff artist for what was then a toymaker. In 1981, Miyamoto created an arcade game inspired by pairing the fictional ape King Kong...
...Shigeru Miyamoto is revered among video gamers for creating a legion of adventures filled with goofy heroes like Mario and Luigi. Among co-workers, though, Miyamoto is equally well known for his cartoonishly hot temper. Early last year, when Nintendo engineers had trouble executing his vision for a new kind of game that involved stepping on a scale and weighing yourself, they learned firsthand just how much like Bowser--Mario's fire-breathing archnemesis--Miyamoto could be. "I suffered the wrath of Miyamoto-san because we weren't coming up with enough ideas," developer Arisa Hosaka said in an online...
...Miyamoto I meet in a New York City hotel suite in April is disarmingly polite. Casually dressed in black jeans and a T shirt, he's happy and relaxed as he shows off the game that nearly led his 15-person development team to quit in frustration. Despite his outbursts, Miyamoto held them together. "It helps for me to work with some of those younger developers," he says, "so they understand that it's O.K. to take your time and flesh out ideas and really turn it into something special...
With Fit, Miyamoto is abandoning those familiar faces--it's about time, say his critics--and taking gamers in a new direction. Although many people dread weighing themselves, the slight, 137-lb. (62 kg) designer hatched the idea for Wii Fit when he realized he got a kick out of charting his own weight on a piece of paper taped to the wall: "My whole family took an interest. Seeing how that was able to excite the people in my family, I thought, Oh, this is a really neat experience that I'd like to bring to other people...
...veritable Walt Disney of video games, Miyamoto can afford to upset the creative balance. He admits that devising Fit was a lot less fun than playing it. "There tends to be a lot of nervousness about working on a product like this. Video games have a lot of expectations, and developers tend to have stress to meet those," he told me. Miyamoto draws from his personal life to create new games. His love of dogs led to the virtual-pet title Nintendogs, and his gardening hobby grew into the carrot-shaped Pikmin in the eponymous GameCube...