The day before the award was announced — October 22 — Miyamoto held a press conference at Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto.
Miyamoto: I feel terribly embarrassed, but I am truly honored to have been chosen for such a prestigious award.
As I always say, I do not make games by myself. This award is the result of making them together with a great many people, so I intend to receive it as their representative.
Especially recently, I have also been doing a lot of work with people outside games — Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan, the film business, and so on. I want to share the joy of this award with all of them.
Lately there has been a run of anniversaries, including Zelda's 40th, and I myself have been introduced as someone who has been making games for 45 years. But when I think about it, I joined Nintendo in 1977 and became involved in game work right away, so it is actually already 50 years. It is an easy number, so this time I will talk about it as "50 years."
Fifty years ago I became involved with this medium called "games," something you could not even tell had a physical form, and I have been allowed to keep doing this work ever since. I think I am being treated this way because I was there from the very beginning, and I feel I have had a very lucky life.
Reporter: This award seems to symbolize a change in the place games hold in society. How do you see the relationship between games and society, and how would you like it to develop from here?
Miyamoto: This becomes more a story about Nintendo than about society, but when I was a child, Nintendo had products called kateiban — home board games. Diamond Game, Rocket Game, and hyakunin isshu too. They would sit stacked on top of the dresser for a year, and at New Year's everyone would take them out and play. I had always thought that kind of relationship between Nintendo and everyday life was a good one.
Even after we started making video games, there would be a console at the center of the living room, where everyone would relax and live their daily lives. I thought, "That is very Nintendo," and I have made things with that in mind. Not only for people who play games, but things that can interest people who do not. We have kept going with the idea: let's keep making things that would not look out of place in the living room.
When I started making games, around age 26, people my own age around me were not really playing games yet. Gradually it became a generation in which fathers had grown up playing games, and before I knew it I was a grandfather — and grandfathers were a generation that had played games too.
That three generations of a family know games is an enormously big thing. Doesn't that mean the connection has become that much deeper?
To have people say, "Let's go ahead and look at games as culture, too" — I am very grateful for that. I hope we can keep making things that are always there, at the center of the living room.
Particular about controllers as interactive play. "There is no one in the world who takes interface as seriously as the people who make games."
Reporter: Looking back over your 50 years of work, what do you think led to this award? Please also tell us about any difficulties or turning points that stayed with you.
Miyamoto: If we are talking about difficulties and turning points, the period when we moved from the GameCube to the Wii was a time full of worries. Games evolved along with the people who played them. Consoles became more powerful, and players' skill levels kept rising.
Even at school there were conversations like, "You're an otaku? You play games?" There was a period when I felt there was something like a standing screen between people who play games and people who do not.
I thought the ideal was the opposite: games blending into everyday life, so that you are always in touch with games. But to aim for that, I started to think that the controller itself — which we were supposedly making in order to make games more fun — had in fact become complicated, something daunting for a person touching it for the first time.
So with the Wii and the Nintendo DS, we tried, just once, to replace that with an extremely simple form.
As we did that, the generations overlapped, and playing games became an ordinary part of life. The dramatic advance of smartphones and mobile contributed a great deal as well, I think.
And for me, it was not only making games that was interesting. I have always found the interactive medium itself interesting: you do something, and the other side returns something.
In that sense, I think the CAD used in industrial design is the greatest toy there is. I cannot really use it properly, though. (Laughs.) You are trial-and-erroring against a computer, and before you notice, a huge amount of time has passed. To me, that is a perfectly good game.
It turns into a debate over "Is that a game?" But even if it is not a game, I have always aimed to make something, in an interactive medium, that makes you forget ordinary time. That is the first thing.
The other is that games take the question "Can a person use this comfortably?" extremely seriously. Among people who design computer interfaces, I have always thought there is no one in the world who makes interfaces as seriously as the games industry does.
When you use something on the web, you run into designs where the response is poor, or where the default is "No" on a question most people would answer "Yes," so most people accidentally get it wrong. The people who can bring that fine-grained attention to design are the people who make games.
If the various fields that use computers were designed with the same serious attention to the customer that games have, interactive worlds would still have plenty of room to evolve. I also think there would be plenty of chances to say that what Japan can make is the best.
Some years from now, I would be happy if we were valued not as "games," but as a culture of "computer interactive."
He did not want game-making bound by "character settings" — and insisted, "We won't make movies." What changed him was Nintendo fans' love for the characters.
Reporter: A moment ago you said that people who grew up playing games now span three generations. There really are people all over the world who have walked through life alongside Nintendo's work. Please give a message to Nintendo fans around the world, including your outlook from here.
Miyamoto: This is something I have said several times since we started making films a few years ago, but there was a time when I used to talk tough and say, "We won't make movies." Movies need a story, and once you make a story, you end up deciding settings — a character's personality, their family, and so on.
But we had made these characters for games, and we had no idea what kind of game we would make next. If we fixed all sorts of settings in advance anyway, I thought game-making would become constrained.
So I kept saying, "These are characters made for games, so they can only be used in games." But as we kept making games for many years, fans came to love Nintendo characters such as Mario, Zelda, and Kirby.
I came to think that even without playing the games, people could become Nintendo fans simply by loving the characters. That is why I became open to making films. And we started producing them ourselves, thinking, "If we are going to make them, let's do it ourselves."
We are also trying to create places where characters born from games can be seen by even more people — starting a theme park with Universal Studios, for example. Recently we have been offering Pikmin together with Scopely Explore (formerly Niantic) as well. I think Nintendo's characters still have room to spread on mobile.
To the fans, I want to say: thank you. Please keep looking forward to what comes next.
Reporter: Please tell us how you feel about Sonobe, where you were born, and about Kyoto, where you still work.
Miyamoto: For anyone who does not know: I was born in the countryside, in the town of Sonobe in Nantan City, Kyoto. I went to university in Kanazawa. Because it is design work, people would say things like, "For industrial design you have to go to Italy," or "The latest design is in New York." Amid all that, I took a job in Kyoto and steadily made things.
After I turned 30, I was also told that a designer withers if they are not in a cutting-edge city. I did not pay that much mind. I just kept making games.
Then, as I approached 40, the things I had made were somehow being recognized around the world. From around the time I started making them at 30, sales overseas had always been much higher than in Japan.
When people asked, "How can you make things like that?" — and when I thought about it myself — I came to believe it was the result of making things carefully in that place, rather than competing over this and that in a cutting-edge city. The place that made that possible was Kyoto. I thought, "I'm glad I was in Kyoto."
"Global," too — if you think of it as delivering what you have made to a person, then whether it is global, or whether it is a big city, does not really matter. Whoever that person is, you make things for them. To do that, what matters is to stay put in "yourself" — in a sense, the most local place of all — and steadily do all kinds of work.
When you make things, and when you make judgments, all of your past experience is reflected in them. Growing up freely in the nature around me as a child has been reproduced naturally, and that is probably what gets through to people all over the world.
Even if the country is different, the physical stimuli a child receives, and the way they think, ought to be the same. When I felt that, I came to think, as I got older, "I'm glad I grew up in the countryside," and "I'm glad I stayed in Kyoto."
This is not a matter of "I made this game based on the nature of such-and-such a place." Climbing a mountain and sliding back down. Catching fish in a river with my bare hands. Nearly drowning. Things soaked into the body became the origin of my making things. In that sense, I put it this way: Kyoto raised me like that.
"Making" and "tasks": two ideas that look alike but are not the same, and the new line that technological change draws. Even faced with generative AI, "there is still plenty left for us to do."
Reporter: How do you hope to pass on, and entrust to the creators who come after you, Nintendo's idea of "originality" and your own way of thinking?
Miyamoto: The only way is to work it out in the course of daily work, so I just keep at it steadily. But Nintendo now has 3,000 to 4,000 developers alone, and if you include everyone, the scale is about 10,000 people worldwide. It has become difficult to spread the spirit of "originality" that was there at the start to every one of them.
So, in the process of making things together, we have started discussing what "originality" actually is. The people I used to think of as newcomers have, before I noticed, become quite senior themselves. We have just begun an effort to create places where mid-career people can gather and discuss these things.
Reporter: As generative AI lowers the barrier to making things, it feels as if game design is being asked how far human talent can still go. What do you think about generative AI and games as culture?
Miyamoto: That is a very large question. To tell an old story: computers appeared right around our generation, and tools kept evolving, from the typewriter to the word processor.
Designers, for example, learn a technique in school called lettering — writing the text on a poster beautifully by hand. In the old days, if you could do that, you could already be called a designer. Even just taking a design that was popular overseas, turning it vaguely into Japanese, and laying it out was enough to be called a designer.
But as computers and word processors evolved, text could be copied and pasted from somewhere, pictures could be brought in from somewhere, and the machine would write the letters neatly for you. Only once tools started taking on the technical part did a person's own design ability — a sense for layout, and the like — come to the surface.
Because of that, even if the husband was the designer and the wife did the housework, it started happening more and more that the wife actually had the greater design ability. That is what it means for tools to change.
I think what is happening now with generative AI is that kind of thing.
We always separate "making" from "doing tasks." When you set out to make something, you first build the large structure. From there on, filling the empty holes and finishing it neatly — that is the "task."
This is the troublesome part: tasks are fun. While you are doing a task, you get an enormous sense of satisfaction that you are "making" something. What is frightening is the version of yourself that is satisfied by that task and mistakes it for "I made something pretty good."
So the more AI does all sorts of tasks for us, the more it becomes a chance for everyone to think seriously about what "making" really is. I think that is a very good thing.
In design of the past, too, there were surely things that came out of nothing but copy-and-paste. But those do not last, do they? What is in a design is an individual's intention to design something, with the computer helping with that work.
I do not know how far AI will evolve, or whether a day will come when it does everything, including the "making." But at this point, I still feel there is plenty left for us to do.
At the time, the Nintendo DS was "the cheapest computer in the world." Bringing the DS into classrooms with Nintendo DS Classroom, guide systems at art exhibitions, and other experiments went beyond the frame of games.
Reporter: Over these 50 years, games have gone from something children play in the living room to something people of all ages play for health and communication as well. Including the generative AI you just spoke about, how do you think the relationship between games and people will change from here?
Miyamoto: This will be a slightly roundabout answer, but right around the time we were making the Nintendo DS, I thought, "Nintendo's hardware is amazing." We could offer something with that much functionality at that price. What I thought then was that the best use would be as teaching material in schools.
Nintendo DS Classroom, which we made with Sharp, connected each student's DS to the teacher's PC, so the teacher could see how every child was writing their answer at that moment.
We also made a system for places like an art-school graduation exhibition: if visitors carried a DS, it would automatically explain the work in front of them with audio guidance and images. When we turned that into a system that could be designed on the web and offered it, it kept evolving, and became the guide system for the Louvre.
From around then, I started to think that although we call it a game console, it was in substance "the cheapest computer in the world." And as we tried various things on the DS, we began making things that were half games, and half "Can we even call this a game?"
That current — using a game console for things other than games — then advanced all at once with the evolution of the smartphone. For us it is frustrating, but looking at the world as a whole, I think the smartphone's evolution was enormously important as an evolution of media.
Now that things have turned out that way, if you define a game as "using a computer interactively," I think most things are games. And playing only for a purpose inside a game is, of course, one perfectly good kind of game too. I really think the boundary lines have disappeared.
Now even amateurs can make high-performance things. If you enjoy what that person made for an hour, you call it a game no matter how you enjoyed it. When it becomes that, all sorts of play are born, aren't they? Right now, rough as it still is, I think all kinds of things are spreading.
If you define games broadly, we have entered an age when everyone can make games even without a game designer. I had thought, "Having those borders disappear would be the ideal." So I think it has become a very good age.
Reporter: With that in mind, what outlook are you drawing for the future?
Miyamoto: I don't know about the future. (Laughs.) Right now I am absorbed in making films. Even while working with professionals, I want to test how much I can do myself. Within that, I might try to make something like a game again.
With the evolution of digital media, the work has become larger in scale, but there are also parts that can now be done quickly. As long as I still have the will, I want to try various things. And since we talk about "originality," I am thinking I might do something Nintendo does not usually do, and surprise the employees.
Miyamoto's rival is "Professor Rubik"!? The pleasure of showing someone what you have made, and having them be surprised, is the origin of Miyamoto's creativity.
Reporter: Let me ask again: for you, what is a "game"?
Miyamoto: Ever since I was a child, my pleasure was showing someone something I had made and having them go, "Whoa!" In junior high I wanted to be a manga artist, and I would draw manga and show it to people. My parents would come into my room without asking, so I would build tricks that surprised them when they came in, and haunted-house-like contraptions, and enjoy getting scolded.
Even after I took up industrial design, I wanted to make strange things — something that, for reasons you could not explain, just kept moving on top of a table.
When I had just started making games, and people asked, "Who is your rival?", I would answer, "Professor Rubik." The Rubik's Cube is a masterpiece I admired as someone doing industrial design. I wanted to make something like that, so meeting games was very fortunate.
At the arcade, why do people put money in? It is not necessarily a gambling impulse. It is because their own play feels frustrating. I was lucky enough to encounter this thing called a game, which makes a business out of that feeling. As I expanded that, my interest shifted away from receiving money and toward "Why do they want to do it one more time?"
What happens if a person who says it is not interesting just to play comes to feel as if they themselves have entered that world? In other words, a garden-in-a-box kind of game. Once you make a miniature garden, it is more interesting if there is a story around it, so you make the surrounding story.
But we are not storytellers. While the customer is playing the game, a story forms inside the customer. I came to think more and more about how to build that kind of structure.
I have been able to keep doing this work of "How will the other person receive what I put out?", so I feel I was very lucky. My start was not joining Nintendo as a game company, but as a strange toy company that you never knew what it would put out. It was a very lucky encounter.
Reporter: Do you see this award as a destination you have reached, or as one point you are still passing through?
Miyamoto: I still have several jobs underway, so I will just keep doing those. At this age, I do not know when I will no longer be able to work. I am prepared for that, but I still want to enjoy myself and move forward with what I want to do now.
Makers, like players, make things while playing. If I can keep doing that, I think it will be fun.
Reporter: The games you have developed are enjoyed all over the world, I imagine. When do you feel, "I'm glad I did this work"?
Miyamoto: That is a difficult one. All I can say is that watching people play what I made is the greatest pleasure. I make things because I want to convey my own message, but I do not think much about how that message got across. I just keep making, entirely focused on "If I do this, won't they think it is fun? Won't they take an interest?"
In film terms, I am always picturing, as I make it, whether this line is right, whether a shorter one would be better — whether it is being received comfortably. If the people playing or watching are spending that time comfortably and happily, that is enough for me. How that person interprets it, and how they talk about it, I no longer consider my territory.
"Super Mario's greatest invention is that Mario does not fight Bowser." The magic called an idea, which brings light to a technical difficulty.
Miyamoto: I thought a little about which behind-the-scenes story best suits Super Mario, and this time I will talk about the game system.
For example, there used to be a game called Pac-Man. You eat every dot in the maze, and when they are gone, you are done. Anyone can understand that at a glance. Tetris, too: things flutter down from above, you fit them in, and when a horizontal line is complete, it disappears. Anyone can understand that, too.
But Donkey Kong, which I made, had a slightly difficult part. This person goes from point A to point B — and that does not feel like something anyone can understand just by looking.
There is no "clear everything and it becomes beautiful," no "fill everything and you are done," so I struggled quite a bit. To make people understand "you go from here to here," I made it a game in which a gorilla runs away, kidnaps a girl, and you go to rescue her.
Back then, I kept thinking it would be nice if the screen could scroll on and on, so you could go much farther. With the technology of the time, that was difficult. Partly because of that, the foundation was already there: "I wish I could make a game where jumping Mario can keep running forever."
As we put various ideas on top of that — including whether to add a system where eating a mushroom and growing bigger means you are all right even if you get hit once — it became Super Mario.
At that point I thought: a person is running, so they run on the ground, swim in the sea, and fly in the sky. What if everything you wanted to do could be done as an action? I called this "land, sea, and air." That was probably the "invention."
Surely everyone had wanted to try it: racing along sideways, flying through the sky, swimming. When you were a child, you rode the train looking out the window, pointing, imagining a person running, flying, falling into a river. In Super Mario, you can actually do that. And when you try it, something like a world remains there, too.
And the greatest invention in Super Mario — or the behind-the-scenes story — is that Mario is not fighting Bowser. Normally, if there is a boss at the end, you have to fight, right? But making a fight is hard, and I was worrying terribly about what to do.
When I thought, "At this rate, we are not going to be able to make a fight," it struck me: this is a game where you keep running to the right, so what if reaching the far right means you win? "Then why not just jump over him, without fighting?"
Just jumping over Bowser is enough, and after that Bowser falls for you. When we tried it, it was surprisingly fun, and I was really happy when I realized that.
I had been worrying the whole time about "What do we do?" Then I thought, "Could this invention solve it?", tried it, and it was surprisingly fun. That is the behind-the-scenes story of Super Mario. So as we made the second game, and the third, Mario gradually came to fight Bowser properly.
"The fun of playing a game is thinking, 'What happens if I do this next?' And 'what answer do you return there?' is precisely the creator's authorship."
Reporter: What have you held most important in making games up to now?
Miyamoto: What I have valued most is that even in play, you are using your head and thinking. I think the interest of something interactive lies in the player thinking, "What happens if I do this next?" You try it, and some answer comes back. What answer you return there is probably what gets called authorship.
I take that exchange very seriously. Negative or positive, a little mean or full of a desire to please — it differs from person to person. The question is whether it feels comfortable for the player. When you are making something, you tend to get mean, so I try not to overdo it. (Laughs.)
As that exchange repeats, attachment forms inside the player, and it spreads freely. Once it gets that far, we can develop whatever we like. After that, the player digests it on their own. I think being able to build that kind of relationship is the ideal.
Reporter: If there is a mindset you want to pass on to young game creators now, would you share it?
Miyamoto: What I always say is this: even if you are a huge fan of some game, you should stop starting from "it would be more fun if I changed it like this." Up through the part you yourself found really interesting, you have to make it yourself.
Even if you improve something on top of a base, that is the same as what someone else made. I often say that working hard to build the original thing — "Wouldn't it be interesting if I tried something like this?" — is surely more fun, and more worthwhile as work.
Reporter: The 50 years leading up to your receiving the Order of Culture were a time when games were recognized by society as culture and matured, and this award feels like proof of that. How do you think about the spread of games as culture over these 50 years?
Miyamoto: When I make a game, I start from "Would it be fun if you could do something like this?"
The work of thinking, "If people had something like this, if they could do something like this, would it be fun?" — in the old days, I think that connected to making things like films, drawing manga, or writing novels. What is modern, I think, is that another choice was added: "making an interactive system," including games.
That is why I talk about games being one medium, too. From an age when a game was strictly a "game console," I think it has now become quite a bit of a medium.
And if you are going to work in a medium anyway, you might as well handle it yourselves as one medium — making films, doing whatever it is, all of it together. As a result, the media themselves might mix, and something new might come out.
Making images is, in the sense of media, a return to an earlier form. But there is also that reason I thought, "Let's make them anyway."
In the end, "games became culture" means that games became ordinary, doesn't it?
Reporter: How do you yourself feel about that?
Miyamoto: Me? I think, "It's good that there are more choices."
I think, "I wish the choices had been broader when I was young." At the same time, I think, "If there had been that many choices, I might not have been able to choose."
I am only looking for something fun. This is another story from the DS days: I got on a train and saw everyone typing emails on their feature phones. They all looked like they were having a wonderful time, and watching them was frustrating.
I thought, "These people look like they are having more fun typing emails than playing games." I am always thinking I want to become something like that.
In a way, I do not think we need to call games "games" anymore. Watching TikTok and playing a game are not all that different, are they? Of course, games are more interactive, so I do hope we can make use of that strength.
Watching TikTok for a long time is a human activity, too. If we can insert interactivity into that more skillfully, I think it could become something more interesting. Not by building a wall in the form of "games."
Mobile devices have developed this far. Even while you are walking outside, you can do the same things as with a computer. I think we have entered an age of asking, "What interesting things could we do with that?" and "What convenient things could we do?"
Reporter: In the nearly 50 years you have spent at Nintendo, if there are people or episodes that especially influenced you, would you tell us?
Miyamoto: At Nintendo, I think Mr. Yamauchi — Hiroshi Yamauchi — and Mr. Yokoi — Gunpei Yokoi — are indispensable. Mr. Yokoi was someone who thought very hard about how to make whatever was right in front of him interesting, and what I gained from that was enormous.
Mr. Yamauchi was a different type. I think I started actively talking about "originality" because of his influence. He would say things like, "You lot are weak at fighting, so rather than fighting, do something of your own." He must have felt in his bones what we now call "blue ocean" and "red ocean."
Outside Nintendo, I have been influenced quite a bit by Shigesato Itoi. My wife says, "Aren't you a believer in the Church of Itoi?" (Laughs.) On how to perceive what is in front of you, and how to think about it, I learned an enormous amount from him.
Someone who seems to be at the very front of what is popular is not chasing trends. He is steadily doing his own thing. Watching that, and hearing him talk, I learned a great deal.
Also, this has nothing to do with my work now, but I originally aimed to be a manga artist, so I think I really learned all sorts of things from Fujio Akatsuka and Osamu Tezuka as well. After I began working in a new medium, I also became interested in how the people who created the medium of manga, and raised it, changed manga in their later years.
I thought, "If the people who made it first do not change it, it takes a lot of courage for the people who come in later to change it." In that sense, I am of the generation that started making games, so I think, "If we do not actively change things, it will be hard for the people who come after."
