Shigeru Miyamoto retires from current position at Nintendo (not really)

Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the greatest minds behind Nintendo, will be stepping down from his authoritative position so he can “be in the forefront of game development once again”. Don’t panic! He’s not leaving Nintendo, he just won’t be working on large titles such as those from Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda series. Miyamoto simply plans to work on smaller games that won’t take several years to develop. He thinks that he may as well be retiring to show younger developers at Nintendo that he won’t always be here to guide them.

It’s great that Miyamoto is gonna be doing other things and leaving major projects in the hands of the next generation. That is just how things are, the younger folks have to take over at some point and I don’t see a problem with that.

Via Wired

Edit: So it turns out that Miyamoto really isn’t retiring from his current position at all. A statement from Nintendo goes on to say that “Shigeru Miyamoto’s role at Nintendo is not changing. He will continue to be a driving force in Nintendo’s development efforts.” As usual, this stemmed from a mistranslation seeing as “retiring from my current position” is a pretty vague statement. It’s worth noting that after yesterday’s announcement Nintendo’s stock fell by 2%.

I really loved the idea of Miyamoto stepping down to do his own thing, whilst forcing Nintendo to remain a prominent force without him. Miyamoto discusses that he has a “desire to pursue fresh ideas and experiences of the kind that sparked his initial interest in video games” so those smaller projects he plans to develop may not be lost.

Via The Guardian