Danica Davidson
January 3, 2024 
Video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto turned 71 in November, but according to an interview with The Guardian, he has no plans to retire.
“More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over,” he said in an interview that took more than a year for The Guardian, a major British news outlet, to set up. “In this day and age you have to think about things in a five-year timespan, so I do think about who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen.”
Though we wouldn’t have Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda or others without Miyamoto, he also says he doesn’t have the same attachment he used to. He remarked, “I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on. These are things that have already gone out into the world … they’ve been cultivated by others, other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense I don’t feel too much ownership over them any more.” Still, he also noted, “I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”
And his tasks at Nintendo can change over time. “[These days] I don’t think of myself as a game designer,” Miyamoto commented. “I’m about finding unique opportunities for Nintendo. The way things work here is that, more so than having a plan and following it, we come across certain things and from there, we try to find our own new path. The movies, the amusement parks, I’m excited to see what kind of organic things result from those … I’m still very new to [the movie] industry and I’m still learning, but I’m trying to read a lot of scripts these days and learn about how they are developed, to see how we can create uniquely Nintendo films.”
Source: The Guardian
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
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