Update: date=January 2009

Miyamoto is a world-renowned game producer and has been called the "father of modern video games" and "the Walt Disney of electronic gaming". Employed by Nintendo as an artist in 1977, he was given the task of working on one of their first coin-operated arcade games. The resulting title was Radar Scope, which was not as successful in the United States as Nintendo had hoped. Miyamoto later reused the game's hardware and modified it into Donkey Kong, which was a huge success as well as a turning point in video game history. The game's lead character, Mario (then called Jumpman), became an easily recognizable video game character and Nintendo's mascot.

Early life

Miyamoto is the second child of Iijake Miyamoto and Hinako Aruha. The Legend of Zelda, in particular, took inspiration from his childhood exploration. As a child, Miyamoto was antagonized by a neighbor's dog - kept at bay by a chain attached to a post - inspiring the Chain Chomp enemy from the Mario series. In 1970, he enrolled in the Kanazawa College of Art and graduated five years later — though he later remarked that his studies often took a backseat to drawing. Miyamoto was said to have had an eclectic taste in music for his age, being interested in such Western groups as the Lovin' Spoonful, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Ramones and The Beatles.Fact: date=June 2008

Nintendo

At E3's convention in 1997, Miyamoto revealed that he was constantly working with around four hundred people on a dozen or so projects at a time. .

Competition with Sony and Microsoft

In the first six months of straight competition, Wii outsold both its rivals, Sony and Microsoft, with gamers buying more than twice as many Wiis as Xbox 360s and four times as many Wiis as PlayStation 3s. When asked about his vision of this rivalry in the future, Miyamoto said, "My dream is that the Wii becomes this device everybody sees as being the natural thing next to the TV."

Awards and recognition

The name of the main character of the PC game Daikatana, Hiro Miyamoto, is an homage to Miyamoto.

On November 28, 2006, Miyamoto was featured in TIME Asia's "60 Years of Asian Heroes" with Hayao Miyazaki, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Bruce Lee and the Dalai Lama.

At the Game Developers Choice Awards, on March 7, 2007, Shigeru Miyamoto received the Lifetime Achievement Award for a career that spans the creation of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. He was also credited for the company's recent consoles, the Nintendo DS and Wii. He was a keynote speaker at that conference, along with Eiji Aonuma and Satoru Iwata.

Shigeru Miyamoto was chosen as one of the 100 TIME Magazine's 2007 Most Influential People of the Year. He was renominated for, and subsequently topped, the list in 2008.