Creator of Mario, Zelda Says "I'm Retiring", Will Make Smaller Games As head of game design from Nintendo, to work on something smaller, he says. Video game legend, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda has announced that he is retiring from his position as head of Nintendo's game design department, "to work on smaller, more personal projects," within the company, according to an interview with Wired "Inside our office, I've been recently declaring, 'I'm going to retire, I'm going to retire,'" Miyamoto said through his interpreter. "I'm not saying that I'm going to retire from game development altogether. What I mean by retiring is, retiring from my current position." He went on to say that he's taking a leave from supervising massive games like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to work on projects that won't take as long to complete. "What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself," Miyamoto said. "Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small." He hopes that this small project will start in 2012. The reasoning behind Miyamoto's retirement is entirely selfless. He wants to send a message that he won't always be around for younger developers to rely on. "The reason why I'm stressing that is that unless I say that I'm retiring, I cannot nurture the young developers," he said. "After all, if I'm there in my position as it is, then there's always kind of a relationship. And the young guys are always kind of in a situation where they have to listen to my ideas. But I need some people who are growing up much more than today."
He's not leaving - he's stepping back so younger developers can come forward. Basically he's going to nurture the next generation of Miyamotos by giving them more space to do their thing. He'll be there as a consultant or something, he just won't be hands on all day and every day.
Very interesting. Hope this helps to bring about the Miyamoto of this generation. Also, looking forward to seeing what these "small projects" are.
Considering how different the game industry and the who and the way people play games are, I'm sure he's going to have a blast. I do hope he's brought on as full consultant for every future Zelda game though.
I can see why, considering he's pretty much been generally supervising games for the last decade or so rather than being directly involved in making them. Before anyone starts panicking, this won't really change the development of Mario and Zelda games. Koizumi has pretty much been in charge of Mario since Galaxy, with him and his team making that, Galaxy 2, and 3D Land, including Hayashida who directed the later two. Zelda, on the flipside, still has Aonuma, who has basically headed the Zelda series since Ocarina of Time and stated in a recent interview that he believes he never really made the Zelda seriesd his own all this time and wants to change that. In other words, he probably won't be going anywhere for quite some time. On top of that, a large number of the developers in Skyward Sword were new to working on the series, along with Fujibayashi directing his first home console Zelda game (previously directing the Oracle games and Minish Cap). Essentially Miyamoto has been gradually getting less and less involved with the big Nintendo franchises, anyway. I'm glad he's finally going back to personally developing games instead of looking over ones he had little part in, and I and look forward to seeing what he'll come up with. EDIT: It turns out it he might have been mistranslated.
^Ah, okay. Still hope that this will see the rise of a worthy successor for Miyamoto for when the world needs one.
When you think about it, when Miyamoto created Mario and Zelda, they were "small" projects, cause in those days, there were no big budget games. In time, Mario and Zelda grew big while others fade away. So, now Miyamoto's going back to creating smaller projects. We could be looking at the birth of new Nintendo franchises that will be big franchises in a decade.
According to Nintendo, none of this is really true. Nintendo Denies That Mario's Creator Is "Retiring" Or at least, retiring is completely the wrong word for it.
