Super Mario maker Miyamoto has no plans to retire from Nintendo: "I’m thinking about the day I fall over"

Super Nintendo World Osaka opening day, Miyamoto celebration — (Image credit: Universal Studios Japan / Nintendo)

Shigeru Miyamoto supposedly has no plans to retire from Nintendo, though his role at the company has shifted dramatically.

Miyamoto has worked at the company for over 45 years, creating several of the industry’s most prominent mascots such as Zelda and Mario, influencing every piece of Nintendo hardware from the NES to the Switch, and shaping video games as we know them today. But the world’s most important game designer plans to stop working when he physically can’t anymore.

When asked about retirement plans, in an insightful interview with The Guardian, Miyamoto says: “More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over.” With his age in mind, Miyamoto says he plans his future in five-year increments and thinks a lot about “who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen.”

Miyamoto’s work has impacted generations of gamers and, probably, the entire globe based on the gamification of practically every single app, but he’s not especially worried about his legacy. “I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on,” he says, before mentioning that the newest Super Mario and Zelda games have been largely built by newer, younger teams: “Other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense I don’t feel too much ownership over them anymore.”

Miyamoto is seemingly only concerned about his legacy enduring within his teams, curiously pointing to a scene from Iron Man where the president is no longer allowed inside the company that he built, despite his portrait still hanging from the wall. “I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”

What does Miyamoto do these days, then? “I’m about finding unique opportunities for Nintendo,” he says, surely referring to his work on Nintendo’s growing theme park presence and the smash hit Super Mario Bros Movie that opened earlier this year. “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,” he explains. “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.”

Check out the upcoming Nintendo Switch games to see what’s next for the Big N.

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.