14 DAY TRIAL // Shigeru Miyamoto is pretty much the equivalent of Willie Wonka. A weird, eccentric, and sometimes misunderstood genius, but a genius nonetheless, Miyamoto has designed some of the most successful and innovative games for Nintendo. While trying to understand the cogs that make such a mind turn will always result in disappointment and failure, it does not mean that we, lowly humans, are not willing to try. Amongst the many that have tried is Edge, and, this time, the magazine tried to simplify things in order to increase the chances of comprehension.
As such, the magazine talked to Miyamoto, but instead of asking about his creation, it took a more mundane approach to the situation, and investigated his average, daily chores within the company. "I can probably roughly divide things into three equal sections," he replied. "About one third of my working year on average is spent in meetings [laughs]. Meetings of the board of directors, say, or meetings for development. And then I spend probably roughly a third of my time working with people outside of our Kyoto office."
"We have teams working in Tokyo, for example, and there are also people outside of the company who are still involved in development. Besides that, the final third is spent working more closely on direct game development: I'm talking about internal game and software development," Miyamoto added. "That's working on things like testing prototypes, and looking at the experiments teams might have been working on: I'm particularly interested in seeing how people might react to these things we've been doing, and discussing how we can improve things."
But sometimes, things just don't go as you plan, and that sparkle of genius is needed for some hands-on development. "And if nothing appears to be working, if there's nothing we can do to get real progress with a project, I have to step in to write down the development sheets and get involved in the planning myself." Miyamoto concluded by saying that, "But I have to make a point for other things. Because I'm often in the office from nine in the morning until ten or even midnight, I make sure that Tuesday evening is free for swimming. I'm busy, you could say, but not as busy as magazine writers [laughs]." Well, we can definitely see that his public relations skills are put to good use, besides his creativity.