Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto Profiled In This Week's New Yorker: ‘I Want People To Be Entertained’

A handy e-mail I just received has brought good news: Nintendo‘s Shigeru Miyamoto has been profiled in the New Yorker! About time the man has been honored with a sufficiently fancy interview from the sufficiently fancy magazine.

And yes, the interview is free to read online. No having to buy a physical copy of the magazine to check it out.

One warning: it’s a pretty long profile, so you may want to set aside your entire lunch break to read it all. This isn’t some two-minute blog post or anything like that.

Highlights include:

• “At first, the Nintendo executives in America thought that Donkey Kong, as both a name and a game, was doomed. Looking for a better name for Jumpman, they settled on Mario, because of his resemblance to their landlord.”

• “Super Mario represented a re-start. Again, the object was the rescue of a maiden, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, or King Koopa, an evil turtle.” (EVIL TURTLE~!)

• Will Wright said, of Miyamoto’s games, “When you play his games, you feel like you’re a kid and you’re out in the back yard playing in the dirt.”

• “When I asked the assistant who’d shown me to the conference room where Miyamoto was, he replied, ‘Mr. Miyamoto is the person who is very difficult to find. In Nintendo, everyone wants to find him’.” (That’s hilarious.)

• Miyamoto’s ethos sums up as: “When I’m making video games today, I want people to be entertained. I am always thinking, How are people going to enjoy playing the games we are making today? And as long as I can enjoy something other people can enjoy it, too.”

And it goes on. Really, you’d be a fool not to take a few minutes today, or this week, or whenever, to read the whole thing. It’s great from top to bottom.