The Man Nintendo Won’t Let Take the Bus

Every morning, Nintendo sends a car to pick up Shigeru Miyamoto from his house and drive him to work. Every evening, the same car brings him home. The company is not doing this out of generosity—they’re doing it because they cannot afford to lose him to a traffic accident, or to anything else. That’s the level of institutional anxiety surrounding one game designer from Kyoto. If that sounds excessive, consider the inventory: Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox. Not bad for one brain.

Vox made a short documentary about how Miyamoto approaches his work—how he keeps creating things that survive decades, that children fall in love with and adults can’t fully let go of. His answer, when pressed, is almost frustratingly simple: don’t chase trends. Don’t make what’s popular this minute. Look at the whole picture, take your time, make something genuinely good. Which sounds like obvious advice until you realize almost no one in the industry actually follows it. The entire business runs on franchises being strip-mined until they collapse, on copying whatever just worked for someone else.

Watching him talk about design, there’s an unhurried quality I find myself envying. The games industry is as anxious and reactive as any other media business, always sprinting toward whatever just caught fire. Miyamoto moves differently. The most recognizable character in the history of games still gets driven to work like a protected diplomat—and somehow that seems completely right. Some things are worth protecting from ordinary chaos.