games

Original Source: New York Times

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IT’S O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney. When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miyamoto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he made his own toys, carving wooden puppets with his grandfathers’ tools or devising a car race from a spare motor, string and tin cans. Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approaches his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotel suite a few dozen stories above Midtown Manhattan, the preternaturally cherubic 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiated the contentment of someone who has always wanted to make fun. And he has. As the creative mastermind at Nintendo for almost three decades, Mr. Miyamoto has unleashed mass entertainment with a global breadth, cultural endurance and financial success unsurpassed since Disney’s fabled career.

Mario, the mustached Italian plumber he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, rivaled only by Mickey Mouse. As the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies) and the person who ultimately oversees every Nintendo game, Mr. Miyamoto may be personally responsible for the consumption of more billions of hours of human time than anyone around. In the Time 100 online poll conducted this spring, Mr. Miyamoto was voted the most influential person in the world.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s latest creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. (Mr. Miyamoto’s full title is senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s entertainment analysis and development division.) Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games). So far the Wii has sold more than 25 million units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

Last week Nintendo released its new Wii Fit system in North America, a device that hopes to make doing yoga in front of a television screen almost as much fun as driving, throwing, jumping or shooting in a traditional game. Though there were no hard sales figures available as of Tuesday, there were reports of stores across the country selling out of Wii Fit.

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