Today, you feel a bit like how our parents must have felt when they heard The Beatles were breaking up (or your grandparents, you whippersnappers).
Shigeru Miyamoto is looking to leave his current role at Nintendo. Many outlets are reporting this as "retiring," but that's not really the case. Retirement would suggest he's leaving game development altogether. Quite the contrary; Miyamoto is instead talking about become a
more active developer, working on more small projects and stepping away from more complex projects like, say,
Zelda for Wii U.
History will back me up here: That's awesome.
Miyamoto's role in recent years has been fairly hands-off. Of course, he never created games single-handedly. He came from art school and was never a programmer. Even early projects like saw him in a director's role as outside contractors (e.g. Zaxxon developers
Ikegami Tsushinki in the case of Donkey Kong) did the coding work. As games have grown more complex, his role has become more supervisory: Overseeing others' work, offering advice, shooting down ideas he finds objectionable, helping to polish things. You can definitely feel his guiding hand in masterpieces like Super Mario Galaxy, but they're not his games. Miyamoto is more the general occasionally touring the frontlines than a soldier in the trenches.
But like I said, he came from art school. And not that I have anything like a fraction of Miyamoto's creativity and talent, but as a fellow art school refugee, I have a feeling he's never really loved playing the part of manager. The artist's temperament is one that revolves around creativity and involvement. Right-brained people don't want to fuss over others, they want to bring their own visions to life. (Remember, Miyamoto's left-handed, a trait generally associated with creative types.) Indeed, Miyamoto's most significant projects have always been the ones he's been heavily involved in:
Donkey Kong,
Super Mario Bros.,
The Legend of Zelda,
Super Mario 64, and
Ocarina of Time each helped defined the medium, and he was right there in the thick of things for all of them. More recently, Nintendogs and Wii Fit helped reshape the notion of what games can be and do, and they helped pave the way for today's iDevice-dominated casual market (oops). Even Miyamoto's pet projects that don't change the world or even the industry --
Yoshi's Island, for instance, or
Pikmin -- are some of the most enjoyable games you could ever hope to play. I guess that makes Wii Music the elephant in the room, but no one's perfect.
A common thread in 1UP's reviews of Nintendo games of late has been that they're fun but feeling a little predictable. This isn't some vile editorial mandate or wicked plot to smear the company; it's a genuine sentiment among people who grew up playing earlier versions of these same games. And it's not like it's a problem unique to Nintendo.
Everyone is making bigger, more expensive games that have to sell better and better in order to recoup their development costs. Risk begets conservativism. I have a feeling that Miyamoto is the sort of person who finds the idea of playing it safe ananthema. I also can't imagine that he'll find working on smaller projects with less risk, less overhead, and fewer people underfoot to be anything less than liberating.
So, in summary: One of the most creative minds in gaming -- one of the men who defined the medium -- is stepping back from managing large-scale projects so he can create the games and toys he wants to design. Like I said, that's awesome.
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9092507
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