While Mario mastermind Shigero Miyamoto may still have the heart of a child, he's been in the business a very long time and his retirement is a disheartening inevitability. As such, the company is trying to lean less and less on his constant guidance to prepare for the future.
Speaking with GameSpot, Miyamoto explained:
This year I’m past 60; I’m going to be turning 61 this year. So for me to not be thinking about retirement would be strange. But in fact, the number of projects I’m involved in–and the volume of my work–hasn’t changed at all.
Instead, what we’re doing internally is, on the assumption that there may someday be a time when I’m no longer there, and in order for the company to prepare for that, what I’m doing is pretending like I’m not working on half the projects that I would normally be working on to try to get the younger staff to be more involved.
He then went on to explain how Nintendo is structured in such a way that the much of the staff tends to rely on him too much for direction, and he wants to change that. "For a long time I’ve been thinking that we need to try to break that structure down so that the individual producers that I’m working with are really taking responsibility for the projects that they’re working on.”
A Miyamoto-less Nintendo is an awfully scary thought. Let's hope his departure from Nintendo comes later rather than sooner.
