Shigeru Miyamoto: Creator of Excellence

Shigeru Miyamoto is the man behind Zelda. He's also the man behind Mario, Donkey Kong, and pretty much every famous Nintendo character. He's been with Nintendo longer than I've been playing Nintendo. It is often said that Mr. Miyamoto is to gaming what John Lennon was to music. Miyamoto grew up in Sonebe, Japan. He enjoyed reading and drawing cartoons as a child, he had no television, so his interests turned to working on making dance dramas and puppet shows. Nintendo hired him as the first company artist in 1977. In 1980, he began working on video games. His first product was an arcade game called Radarscope. However, that was eventually trashed. Miyamoto's first finished product was DONKEY KONG! In 1984, Miyamoto got his own R&D team, Joho Kaihatsu. These are the people who have come up with most, if not all, Zelda and Mario games. Shortly after, Miyamoto was promoted to producer! Since this time, he has worked on all sorts of games. Miyamoto's games are based on fantasy, folklore, legend, etc. Nintendo's success is directly related to Miyamoto's work. Miyamoto is now working on games for the Gameboy Advance (cheers in background) and the NINTENDO GAMECUBE (wild, wild applause). We can only hope that Miyamoto will never tire of bringing us infinite joy. If he retires, we'll have to start bribing him. ;)

~Daniel Rendleman