If you take his word for it
For thousands of years and at least one Pirates of the Caribbean movie (arguably all four), people have been interested in a source of eternal life. We’re not talking some Wishmaster “I don’t ever want to die” GOTCHA!-ass-shit that leaves you looking like the Crypt Keeper when you hit age 206. We’re talking Dorian Gray without the lifelong crippling fear of picture frames.
Nintendo genius and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto might have it.
Speaking to Kotaku, the 63-year-old laughed off the idea of aging and coming full circle with the latest Zelda, saying, “I personally don’t feel like I’ve gotten old.”
He might be right. First, I don’t think Miyamoto is old, mostly because he’s younger than my dad, which is a lifelong shifting goalpost of what “old” means until I get slid into a coffin of my own. Second, look how youthful he looks! Plus. he still makes games at Nintendo, a company that makes video games for youths (also known as “kiddie games”) and you can’t be a rheumatory-ass cane-walker to do that. You think Dennis Hopper could create a safe, fun, age-appropriate game for your children? No, because he got old. Even died from it.
Miyamoto, on the hand? Still working on Pikmin!
He did offer some good dishing on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though. A lot of people think that Zelda is about dungeons that can be traversed with a recently acquired item or z-targeting or the Hero of Time or whatever. Wrong. It’s about hiking.
“[I[f we were to make it 3D and really realistic, and render the player realistic, you’d run into games that are just like that all over the place,” he said of the new Zelda. “And so Zelda is really about exploring and adventuring [through] the land. And you’re kind of fighting against the land as if you were hiking in real life, and that’s how this game works. And the player has to think for themselves and has to put their ideas into practice. That’s what this game is.”
It’s a theme, not a set of mechanics or aesthetic choices. In that context, the surprising, Spider-Man-like climbing (you walk into any vertical surface for long enough and Link starts to scale it) system in Breath of the Wild becomes a more interesting idea. Same with the constantly breaking equipment and subsequent foraging. The Jack London-evoking subtitle seems a good fit.
What Makes Shigeru Miyamoto Tick [Kotaku]
