SpriteCell

Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo video game designer finds real-world inspiration Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo video game designer finds real-world inspiration

www.latimes.com/archives/la-...
Another Miyamoto interview that had escaped me until now. Nothing about Zelda, sorry.

Some details on the elephant hangers, a chair made of rope made for a school project.

"I thought it would be nice to make a game people can buy while they’re at the pet store."

Statue of Donkey Kong in Bergsala.

Statue of Link in Bergsala.

Statue of the Master Sword in Bergsala.

Statue of Pikachu in Bergsala.

Imgur user Oliversupermario visited Bergsala offices in 2017 and took some pictures of the statues inside, which are of varying quality: imgur.com/gallery/toda...

A photo of a crowd around a statue of Mario standing atop a green pipe.

This statue was located outside of Bergsala, Nintendo's Nordic distributor. It was replaced in 2016 with something better, according to this Kotaku article: web.archive.org/web/20160827...

A photo of an odd looking, squat Mario holding a mushroom on top of a white pole that says Nintendo.

Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Korean, and more versions of Wikipedia use a picture of this odd looking Mario as the lead image for their Mario pages.

First part of the transcript of an interview between Geoff Keighley and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Second part of the transcript of an interview between Geoff Keighley and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Game Head eventually became GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley and there was another Miyamoto interview in 2013. This is unfortunately only available on Amazon Prime Video and protected by DRM.
So I bought it and copied the closed captions of the entire interview.

A picture of Kohn Architecture's Nintendo New York office plan, showing a Paper Mario Color Splash image, which was released in 2016, several years after the interview took place.

A floor plan of Nintendo's New York offices, according to Kohn Architecture, showing that Nintendo does not own the entire floor.

If the place Kohn made is the place from the interview then at least the reception desk has been moved. I can’t find any source about Nintendo having a New York office space.
The Color Splash image suggests it was made in 2016, around the time of the name change, but well after the interview.

Kohn Architecture has a page for “Nintendo Corporate Offices – New York City”, but it is described as “close to the Nintendo World Store", the previous name of Nintendo New York, not being part of it.
kohnarchitecture.nyc/nintendo-cor...

Nintendo New York is a retail store, but would it have an office with a reception desk somewhere? I’m not familiar with the layout of the store, but could there plausibly be room in the building for this office?

Mr. Miyamoto leaves the door open for a third Mario brother if a need ever arises.
He says the Pikmin 3 team is “very close to his desk”.

I am curious about where this interview took place. It is said to be in New York, and it is clearly a Nintendo office, with Mario items decorating the area.

Shigeru Miyamoto and Geoff Keighley, wearing Luigi hats.

Shigeru Miyamoto and Geoff Keighley, wearing Luigi hats, Bill Trinen is standing nearby.

A picture of a reception desk with a Nintendo sign.

A picture a bit further into the office, showing a green warp pipe in the background.

The full text transcript is available on SpriteCell spritecell.com/shigeru-miya...
(this page will take a while to load)
Since I can't share the video directly, here’s some pictures I took of my monitor.

First part of the transcript of an interview between Geoff Keighley and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Second part of the transcript of an interview between Geoff Keighley and Shigeru Miyamoto.

Game Head eventually became GameTrailers TV with Geoff Keighley and there was another Miyamoto interview in 2013. This is unfortunately only available on Amazon Prime Video and protected by DRM.
So I bought it and copied the closed captions of the entire interview.

Shigeru Miyamoto looking at a black and white print out of Paris Hilton playing a DS.

Shigeru Miyamoto looking at a cropped black and white print out of "The Wii60 Family" in confusion.

A photoshopped version of The Addams Family movie poster with Shigeru Miyamoto's head replace Wednesday Addams', Reggie Fils-Aimé replacing Lurch, Satoru Iwata replacing Pugsley, and some other people I don't know.

Keighley shows Mr. Miyamoto a picture of Paris Hilton playing a DS and has him react to it. Next is a photoshopped picture of the Addams Family as “The Wii60 Family”. This is oddly cropped, in black and white, and definitely impossible to make sense of if you hadn’t seen the original image online.

A drawing by Shigeru Miyamoto of Mario playing a GameCube.

This picture on the wall is interesting, according to @mariobrothblog.bsky.social (www.patreon.com/posts/supper...) at some point it was on display at the Montreal Science Center, but the area around it looks different in that photo, and it would be unusual for this interview to take place there.

YouTube video by TopSpot123's Media Archive Game Head "Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto: A Super Tribute" S04E11 Spike TV 2007

A couple of new-to-me Miyamoto interviews, starting with Geoff Keighley's Game Head from 2007. This whole episode was a tribute to Mr. Miyamoto, but he isn't listed on IMDB for it. Several people speak about him, including Mega64, Game Jew, and Koji Kondo.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw4X...

I've been overwhelmed with various crises happening all at once lately. And then today my internet stopped working suddenly. I managed to get that sorted out, but I still need more time before I'm back to where I want to be.
I've got about 20% of the data I need for my next project. Maybe April.

No, I've never seen this, a great find.

A black and white photo of the core dev tream for A Link to the Past, with Kensuke Tanabe circled in read. The photo is from the Shogakukan guide to Trifoce of the Gods. This scan is courtesy of GlitterBerri, who runs a game translation website.

Kensuke Tanabe announced that he is retiring in an interview today!

He was a script writer who worked on A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, so let's talk a little bit about him and his career.

#Zelda
#TanabeQuote

LTTP team (via @glitterberri.bsky.social's site!):

A very tall image. it's got 7-8 different quotes on it, an image of Satomi Asakawa, and screenshots of various games that influenced her early in her life and career.

A very tall image. it's got 5-6 different quotes on it, screenshots of animation and film that influenced Asakawa, some images of her senior project from DigiPen, and some images of the first characters she designed for Ocarina of Time.

A very tall image. It's got 4 different quotes on it, an image of Satomi Asakawa, and screenshots of characters she designed for Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, and Pikmin 2

A very tall image. It's got 2 different quotes on it, and a big collage of art of characters that Asakawa's team designed for Twilight Princess. It also has some photos of her, including some from Twilight Princess development and one from a few years after she retired from Nintendo.

Trying something new today!

Zelda Dev Highlight:
Satomi Asakawa, Character Designer

In (mostly) her own words, Asakawa's game dev career from start to end!

#Zelda
#TwilightPrincessQuote, #OcarinaOfTimeQuote, #MajorasMaskQuote
#AsakawaQuote

Full image:
drive.google.com/file/d/1ywWD...

A screenshot of Kynseed, from its Steam page. It has colorful pixel art. A character named Twig is being talked to.

Kynseed seems fairly similar to Stardew Valley. It’s three years old now so it’s very unlikely to get any more than the six reviews it has, but it could conceivably have a Wikipedia page in the future.
Out of the Park Baseball 15 also has an 89 score, same deal with no redirect.

It’s not until Kynseed, an indie Steam farming sim with a score of 89 at ~434th place (the rankings actually change a bit when you reload the page, there’s no telling what kind of decimal precision is tracked behind the scenes) that you find another game without a page.

A screenshot of OOTP Baseball 17, a baseball simulator. From https://ootp-baseball-17.en.softonic.com/mac

The highest metascored game ends up being Out of the Park Baseball 17 at rank 199 and a 92 score, but only by a technicality. There is a page for the OOTP series that discusses each game, but there’s no redirect to that page when entering that name into the search bar. So I looked further.

I decided to find out what game has the highest Metacritic metascore that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.
A game is still considered to have a page if you are taken to a series overview that includes the game, the game that a DLC belongs to, or the non-remastered/remade/deluxe version of that game.

The Fuji Broadcasting Center in Tokyo. It's like two buildings with several enclosed paths connecting them, and also a big metal sphere in between them.

Fuji's headquarters features a 1,350 ton spherical observation room.

YouTube video by kanpei hagama ファミコン40周年(古川俊太郎社長)、ザ・スーパーマリオブラザーズ・ムービー(宮本茂フェロー)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUDo...
A short Japanese-language interview from Fuji TV with Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri.
There's also a short interview with Shuntaro Furukawa in the earlier segment about the Famicom's 40th anniversary.

A top three most played games on the Switch in 2025, featuring Labyrinth of Refrain, Romancing SaGa 2, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

I gave up on the final boss of Labyrinth of Refrain. An exhausting game where you use standard attacks 99% of the time. I might try the sequel eventually.

A "Replay Value" section from Pokémon Power, a Nintendo Power supplement. It encourages readers to start a new save file because they can keep their current Pokémon. Scan by RetroMags.

I've been looking at how Nintendo Power talked about Pokémon early on, and there's quite a few errors and lots of bad advice.
What really takes the cake though is this assertion that you can start a new game and keep all of your Pokémon! How many save files were destroyed because of this?

This is pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, but it didn't seem to exist anywhere outside of The Portal to Texas History and it's a one of a kind game so I think it's worth making it more visible.
The original can be seen here: texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/m...

YouTube video by SpriteCell The making of Black College Football: BCFX: The Xperience

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFhj...
This is a short documentary about the making of Black College Football, released in 2007 and 2009 for Windows and Xbox 360.
Developers at Nerjyzed Entertainment offices are interviewed. One dev is a Ukrainian man who knew very little about American Football.

Platform Adventure did catch my eye since it wasn't on any of the ~40 lists of genres I looked into for my genre project. I didn't have much from the 80s, from Europe, or from early computers though. Always interesting to see how different communities speak about games through their own lens.

A 1985 news report on how Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza are moving away from video games due to a "loss of interest of teenagers in video games" and focusing more on skill games, like SkeeBall.
All these news reports have gone on my YouTube channel, including a few I haven't posted here.