The mushroom kingdom that Shigeru Miyamoto built: The story of Nintendo

An interactive exhibit at the new Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan. Goombas, Shy Guys, Boos and Koopa Troopas from the Mario franchise can be found throughout the museum. — The New York Times

KYOTO, Japan: Shigeru Miyamoto has been making the same request of all new employees at Nintendo for at least the past decade: For the love of all things Super Mario, please design games that might sell 30 million copies.

The request for smash hits that can generate upward of US$1.5bil (RM6.18bil) sounds almost reasonable coming from Miyamoto, a smiling septuagenarian with arched eyebrows and a trove of beloved cultural properties that would make Walt Disney blush.

Despite creating mascots like Super Mario, Princess Zelda and Donkey Kong that have earned billions for Nintendo, Miyamoto dresses like a humble salaryman, wearing company merchandise beneath his blazer. He has consulted on dozens of games and was instrumental in the development of the Wii and Switch consoles, but in recent years has focused on the movies and amusement parks that Nintendo hopes will undergird its future.

“I actually don’t know why I create the things I create,” Miyamoto said through an interpreter during a private interview this week. “I’m just having fun and that is what drives me.”

He was speaking from inside the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan, an exhibition hall that opens Oct 2 and documents the company’s evolution from a local storefront selling handmade playing cards in the 1880s to a video game company nearly a century later.

Unsurprisingly, the museum is mostly dedicated to that second chapter, which opens on Miyamoto’s arrival at the company. (His father, an English teacher from the Kyoto suburbs, had arranged an interview with Nintendo’s president at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi.) Four years later, in 1981, Miyamoto made himself essential by inventing the Donkey Kong arcade cabinets, which introduced an early version of the character Mario and became an international hit.

“Mr Yamauchi back in the day would tell us that we are not good at fighting: ‘We are weak – so don’t go picking fights with other companies’,” Miyamoto said, explaining the company’s longstanding pursuit of originality.

He shared that goal with Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the Game Boy, who worked with him on Donkey Kong. The working relationship was initially distant. “We talked and he provided feedback,” Miyamoto said. “Some critical feedback, as well.” But the colleagues grew close: Yokoi was a witness at his wedding, and Miyamoto said he remained in contact with the inventor’s widow.

Following the path of originality has defined Miyamoto’s work on recent Nintendo consoles and, by extension, the company’s counterintuitive approach to an industry largely driven by expensive graphical realism.

“It might seem like we are just going the opposite direction for the sake of going in the opposite direction, but it really is trying to find what makes Nintendo special,” Miyamoto said. “There is a lot of talk about AI, for example. When that happens, everyone starts to go in the same direction, but that is where Nintendo would rather go in a different direction.”

The museum itself represents the third and latest chapter of Nintendo’s history: its transformation from a video game company into a global entertainment brand. Through concrete and nostalgia, Nintendo is declaring – perhaps for the first time – that it sees itself as a permanent fixture in popular culture.

Just a decade ago, industry analysts believed that Nintendo’s only chance of survival after the failed launch of the Wii U was to stop producing consoles and focus on software development. The press was brutal. “What the Hell Is Wrong With Nintendo?” asked Wired editor Chris Kohler. In 2013, Bloomberg News published an article pointing out that Sony and Microsoft “each sold more consoles in 24 hours than the Wii U maker did in nine months”.

For the first time in its modern history, Nintendo – the first part of its name, “Ninten”, translates to “leave luck to heaven”, a gambling prayer – was reporting annual financial losses to investors.

A branding decision to piggyback off the name and considerable success of its previous console, the motion-controlled Wii, left the market confused. Buyers were later outraged when the console released with impaired functionality, which led the company’s president at the time, Satoru Iwata, to issue an apology.

No Wii U game came close to Miyamoto’s 30-million-copies metric of success. The highest-selling title, Mario Kart 8, sold 8.46 million units.

At the museum on the outskirts of Kyoto, however, the Wii U is represented with pride alongside the Super Nintendo, the GameCube and the rest of the company’s console lineup: enshrined on the second floor.

Oddities crowd the corners. A toy rifle and a baby stroller are saved for a back display subtitled as the company’s “age of exploration”. The language is more direct in Japanese, describing a period from the company’s founding to as far ahead as into its video game era as the “age of challenge”.

The museum has almost no written explanations and Nintendo is not providing guided tours, leaving visitors without the context to know that licensed games like Twister and an early partnership with Disney were among the steps that allowed the company to negotiate its own products onto Japanese shelves.

Additional research is necessary to learn that the Famicom, the precursor to the Nintendo Entertainment System, was on the cutting edge of technology in 1983: an online adapter allowed users to check the weather, conduct banking and place bets on horse races.

Miyamoto said the lack of explanations would allow visitors to intuitively understand Nintendo. “We wanted to make sure that this is someplace that regardless of any language or cultural barrier, people can come to interact and understand,” he said.

The company was revived by the Nintendo Switch in 2017. Initial games like The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild were critical and commercial successes. The coronavirus pandemic also coincided with the release of cozy games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which attracted casual players looking for a virtual taste of fresh air, or “essentially peace in electronic form”, as one young player said. Both games exceeded Miyamoto’s sales target by millions of copies.

Behind the scenes, Miyamoto was also enacting a strategic plan to extend the Nintendo brand to new audiences and revenue streams. He now sits on the company’s board of directors but also holds the title of “Executive Fellow”, which at another company might be seen as the chief creative officer who oversees the development of new products.

After years of ignoring the surge in mobile gaming, the company developed apps like Super Mario Run, which Miyamoto joked during a presentation with Apple could be played while eating a hamburger. (In what appears to be a subtle reference, the museum cafe’s only main dish is burgers.)

Miyamoto was also making trips to Hollywood to develop The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which became the second-highest-grossing film of last year at nearly US$1.4bil. The movie released two months after the opening of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood, the second of four planned theme parks around the world. Now there is a Mario movie sequel planned for release in 2026 and development work on a Zelda film.

How the company will evolve into a media brand is on Miyamoto’s mind, especially as he considers broadening the museum to include more archival records, past console prototypes and artistic drawings.

“If we get to a point where we make 10 movies, maybe we can open a theater next door,” Miyamoto said during a news conference at the museum.

It is no surprise that the Nintendo Museum takes some of its design cues from the cotton-candy amusements that will delight children. Floating question blocks and singing Toads native to the Mushroom Kingdom of the Mario games are spread throughout the museum property – a sterile building from 1969 that originally housed a manufacturing plant for playing cards before it was repurposed in 1988 as a customer service center for product repairs.

The museum offers other interactive experiences, including the chance to paint versions of the company’s original playing cards. In another section, visitors can use comically large controllers to play old Nintendo games; extend a mechanical arm to grab balls; test their love matches with partners; and swing a cushioned bat around a fake living room.

These exhibits allow Nintendo – which declined to say how many employees worked at the museum, who managed it or what it cost to renovate the building – to keep the finer points of its history wrapped in mystery.

Today’s audiences recognise the company brand through its riotous colors and cheerful designs; even the company’s logo is painted the same vivid color as Mario’s red cap. But its Kyoto headquarters are shockingly sterile, housed inside a white rectangular office building with an interior design that Miyamoto has lovingly compared to a hospital waiting room.

There are many tourists who travel to Kyoto to marvel at the nondescript building, even as the pagoda roofs of 800-year-old shrines like Tofuku-ji temple tower in the distance. Some Nintendo officials hope those tourists will now flock a few train stops away to the museum instead, though the company remains torn between discretion and transparency.

“When I put myself in the consumer's perspective, I kind of want to see behind the curtains,” Miyamoto admitted at the news conference.

“Creating a museum like this is very un-Nintendo-like,” he added. “If Mr Yamauchi saw this, he would probably say don’t do it.” – The New York Times