Back in late 2019, Shigeru Miyamoto was lucky enough to win the Person of Cultural Merit award in his native Japan, an award intended to be received by those who have contributed to the country’s culture in an outstanding way. In a recent interview with Famitsu, Miyamoto gave a short statement on receiving the award.
As the first game developer to be given the honor, Miyamoto has broken new ground. He is one of the old guard of Nintendo, who first got the company its current place in the world by creating the Super Mario Bros franchise and Legend of Zelda, two of Nintendo’s biggest titles.
Considering that Nintendo originally started out as a small hanafuda card-making company when it was originally founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, the company has come a long way. Nintendo is one of the three big gaming companies in the world, standing alongside Sony and Microsoft.
While its history has recently had a number of bumps with the underwhelming performance of the Wii U, the Nintendo Switch, along with a wide variety of highly successful games both commercially and critically, have once again reversed its fortunes.
Even though Shigeru Miyamoto is probably the most visible face of Nintendo’s developers, he still believed he was not worthy of the award, as games are very rarely developed by a single person. However, without him and his ideas forty years ago, Nintendo would not be in the place it is today.
However, he also expressed his thanks that video games were finally being seen as having value, and is finally getting the spotlight in Japanese culture. He also expressed his gladness that video games were becoming even more present in day to day life.
Considering all of the hard work that he has done for Nintendo over the past forty years, hopefully Shigeru Miyamoto can continue making games for a good while to come.
