Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本 茂 Miyamoto Shigeru; born November 16, 1952) is a Japanese video game designer and producer and representative director at Nintendo. He is best known as the creator of some of the most critically acclaimed and best-selling video games and franchises of all time, including Donkey Kong, Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Star Fox.

He appeared as a guest in the series finale of Button Bash, during which he and the Smosh Games Crew played Mario Kart 8, for which Miyamoto served as general director.

History
Miyamoto studied industrial design at Kanazawa Munici College of Industrial Arts and Crafts in 1970. Only attending classes half the time, it took him five years to graduate. Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977, when it was moving into video games away from the Japanese playing cards it had made since 1889, and became the company's first staff artist in 1977.

Three years later, in 1980, Nintendo of America was looking for a hit to establish themselves in the arcade market. They ordered a large number of units of an arcade game called Radar Scope, but by the time the machines arrived, interest in the game had waned. Nintendo needed a game that the machines could be converted into easily. Hiroshi Yamauchi called Miyamoto into his office, as he was the only staff member available at the time, and questioned Miyamoto about his knowledge of this new concept. Miyamoto claimed to have loved video games in college. After some licenses fell through, Donkey Kong was born and made a huge hit.

Since then, Miyamoto's games have been flagships of every Nintendo video game console, with his earliest work appearing on arcade machines in the late 1970s. He managed Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development software division, which developed many of the company's first-party titles.

As a result of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's death in July 2015, Miyamoto fulfilled the role of acting president alongside Genyo Takeda until being formally appointed as the company's "Creative Fellow" a few months later. Since this promotion, Miyamoto's involvement with game development has been reduced to a more supervisory role, as he has shifted to oversee some of Nintendo's newest venues, including the production of films using Nintendo IP and the collaboration with Universal Studios for the development of the Super Nintendo World line of theme parks.