Shigeru Miyamoto might be the most influential game developer of all time, but don’t expect him to care about his rankings among other industry legends. Even in the ’90s, Miyamoto wasn’t terribly concerned about competing with other devs who were incrementally pushing existing game genres forward. His true rival? The Rubik’s Cube.
“Since my background is originally in industrial design, I view the Rubik’s Cube as my eternal rival,” Miyamoto said in a 1996 interview with iconoclastic dev Kenji Eno, which was translated earlier this year by Shmuplations. “There’s a kind of product that’s very important to me. It’s not stuff made by veteran craftsmen who have spent years building computer games specifically for gamers, but rather things that make people realize, ‘Wow, computer games can do that…?!'”
Now, decades later, Nintendo has developed a reputation for consistently sidestepping whatever the rest of the industry is doing. But back in the ’90s, the N64 was racing for dominance against the PS1 and Saturn, and games like the then-newly-released Super Mario 64 and then-upcoming Zelda: Ocarina of Time were driving Nintendo’s end of the competition.
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“Making products that surprise non-gamers, that is our big challenge,” Miyamoto continued. “That said, when people point out that we do nothing but make sequels, they’re entirely right. (laughs) I want to hurry up and reach a point where we can leave the franchise titles to the younger staff, while the older folks just do whatever they feel like. (laughs)”
Ultimately, that’s exactly what would end up happening. The Zelda series would end up under the supervision of Eiji Aonuma, while Mario titles would increasingly be led by younger devs like Yoshiaki Koizumi. Meanwhile, Miyamoto seemed to be more interested in oddball concepts like Pikmin and Wii Music, and even now has become more of a face for Nintendo’s filmmaking aspirations than its modern video games.
In the interview, Eno alludes to “a real danger that games were becoming too niche and catering only to maniacs.” That’s why he made D, an adventure game that plays like a sort of interactive horror movie – far different from the typical action games of the time.
“It’s not that I want people to just make standard action games or shoot-’em-ups for the N64,” Miyamoto responded, “but there are very few creators who are willing to seriously tackle an N64 action game. All the veterans have migrated over to RPGs. For our part, we don’t want to just cater to hardcore gamers; we want to capture new customers every single time.”
