Employed by Nintendo (then a toy company) as an artist, in 1980 he was given the task of designing one of their first coin-op arcade games. The resulting title Donkey Kong was a huge success and the game's lead character Mario has become Nintendo's mascot. Miyamoto quickly became Nintendo's star producer and built a large stable of franchises for the company, most of which are still active and very well-regarded.
At odds with standard industry practices, Miyamoto showed unwillingness to rehash existing titles and would rarely create a sequel without significantly evolving the game into a fresh experience. However, this is somewhat less true now than it was in the heyday of the Super Famicom; the increasing complexity of game development has meant that he is now spread rather thinner over more titles and only a few GameCube titles have shone through as true Miyamoto games, most notably the Pikmin series.
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Shigeru Miyamoto was born in Sonobe-cho, Kyoto, Japan. As a young boy, Miyamoto loved to draw, paint pictures, and explore the landscape surrounding his home. In 1970, he enrolled in the Kanazawa Munici College of Industrial Arts and Crafts, and graduated five years later, though he would later remark that his studies often took a backseat to doodling. In 1977, Miyamoto, armed with a degree in industrial design, scored a meeting with Hiroshi Yamauchi -- a friend of his father, and the head of Nintendo of Japan. Yamauchi hired Miyamoto to be a "staff artist," and assigned him to apprentice in the planning department.
In 1980, the fairly new American branch of Nintendo released "Radarscope," an arcade game they hoped would kickstart a long reign of success, but instead turned out to be a huge flop. To stay afloat, Nintendo of America desperately needed a smash-hit game. Hiroshi Yamauchi assigned Miyamoto— the only person available— the task of creating the game that would make or break the company.
After consulting with some of the company´s engineers (Miyamoto had no prior programming experience), and composing the music himself on a small electronic keyboard, Donkey Kong was born.
Donkey Kong was an overnight success. Out of the three characters Miyamoto created for the game— Donkey Kong, Mario, and Pauline— Mario has found the most success, and since his debut in Donkey Kong he has appeared in more than 100 games spanning over a dozen gaming platforms.
Miyamoto is usually listed as "producer" in the credits of Mario games. The few exceptions include the Mario Land series, which he had virtually nothing to do with.
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