Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto also named "Beauty and the Beast" and the 1933 film King Kong as influences.

Miyamoto had high hopes for his new project, but lacked the technical skills to program it himself; instead, he conceived the game's concepts, then consulted technicians on whether they were possible.

He wanted to make the characters different sizes, move in different manners, and react in various ways.

However, Yokoi viewed Miyamoto's original design as too complex.

Yokoi suggested using see-saws to catapult the hero across the screen but this proved too difficult to program.

Miyamoto next thought of using sloped platforms and ladders for travel, with barrels for obstacles.

When he asked that the game have multiple stages, the four-man programming team complained that he was essentially asking them to make the game repeat, but the team eventually successfully programmed the game.

Miyamoto was born on November 16, 1952, in the Japanese town of Sonobe, Kyoto Prefecture.

His parents were of "modest means", and his father taught English.

From an early age, Miyamoto explored the natural areas around his home.

He discovered a cave, and, after days of hesitation, went inside.

His expeditions into the Kyoto countryside inspired his later work, particularly The Legend of Zelda, a seminal video game.

His games have been flagships of every Nintendo video game console, from the arcade machines of the late 1970s to the present day.

In the early 1970's, Miyamoto graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts with a degree in industrial design.

He had a love for manga and initially hoped to become a professional manga artist before considering a career in video games.

He was influenced by manga's classic kishōtenketsu narrative structure, as well as Western genre television shows.

In the 1970s, Nintendo was a relatively small Japanese company that sold playing cards and other novelties, although it had started to branch out into toys and games in the 1960s.

Through a mutual friend, Miyamoto's father arranged an interview with Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi.

With the help of his father, he joined Nintendo in 1977 after impressing the president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, with his toys.

After showing some of his toy creations, he was hired in 1977 as an apprentice in the planning department.

Miyamoto helped create the art for the coin-operated arcade game, Sheriff.

He was inspired to enter the video game industry by the 1978 arcade hit Space Invaders.

He first helped the company develop a game after the 1980 release Radar Scope.

He helped create art for the arcade game Sheriff, and was later tasked with designing a new arcade game, leading to the 1981 game Donkey Kong.

The game achieved moderate success in Japan, but by 1981, Nintendo's efforts to break it into the North American video game market had failed, leaving them with a large number of unsold units and on the verge of financial collapse.

Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to convert unsold Radar Scope units into a new arcade game.

He tasked Miyamoto with the conversion, about which Miyamoto has said self-deprecatingly that "no one else was available" to do the work.

Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, supervised the project.

Miyamoto imagined many characters and plot concepts, but eventually settled on a love triangle between a gorilla, a carpenter, and a woman.

He meant to mirror the rivalry between comic characters Bluto and Popeye for the woman Olive Oyl, although Nintendo's original intentions to gain rights to Popeye failed.

Bluto evolved into an ape, a form Miyamoto claimed was "nothing too evil or repulsive".

This ape would be the pet of the main character, "a funny, hang-loose kind of guy".

Miyamoto's games Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) helped the Nintendo Entertainment System dominate the console game market.

He managed Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development software division, which developed many Nintendo games, and he played an important role in the creation of other influential games such as Pokémon Red and Blue (1996) and Metroid Prime (2002).

Shigeru Miyamoto (宮本 茂) is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors as an executive since 2002.

Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in video games, he is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox and Pikmin.

More than 1 billion copies of games featuring franchises created by Miyamoto have been sold.

Born in Sonobe, Kyoto, Miyamoto graduated from Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts.

He originally sought a career as a manga artist, until developing an interest in video games.

Following the death of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in July 2015, Miyamoto became acting president alongside Genyo Takeda until he was formally appointed "Creative Fellow" a few months later.