Shigeru Miyamoto
Creator of Mario & Zelda
The legendary Nintendo designer behind Mario, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda. As the industry stampedes toward AI, he says Nintendo “would rather go in a different direction” — betting on its veteran developers instead.
In his words
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.
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.
Biography
Shigeru Miyamoto (born 1952) is the most influential game designer in history: creator of Donkey Kong (1981), Super Mario Bros. (1985), and The Legend of Zelda (1986), and the creative conscience of Nintendo for over four decades. Now a Representative Director and Fellow, he shapes the company’s design philosophy, its theme parks, and its films.
Going the other way
In a September 2024 interview with The New York Times, conducted around the opening of the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Miyamoto addressed the industry’s AI rush with characteristic understatement: when everyone runs the same direction, Nintendo goes the other way. He framed the choice not as contrarianism but as brand identity — the company’s value lies in what its experienced developers make by hand.
The comments crystallized Nintendo’s broader posture. President Shuntaro Furukawa had told investors months earlier that while the company uses established AI-like technology in its games, generative AI raises intellectual-property concerns, and Nintendo would keep delivering value through “know-how cultivated over decades” rather than machine-generated content. Amid an industry defined by AI announcements and AI layoffs, Nintendo remains the highest-profile publisher to publicly opt out of the generative wave.
Miyamoto has spent his career resisting industry consensus — insisting on gameplay over graphics arms races, motion controls over horsepower, and toys over specs — and the AI question is, for him, the same question. His stance carries unusual weight because Nintendo’s counter-positioning has repeatedly produced the industry’s most profitable hardware generations.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/shigeru-miyamoto