During an interview with Wired, the industry fixture said he was retiring from his position as Nintendo's head of Game Design to work on smaller projects, but Nintendo says that's not the case.
It looked like after leading big projects at Nintendo—from their earliest coin-op efforts to his most recent work on Skyward Sword—Shigeru Miyamoto was passing the torch on to some of the more junior designers at Nintendo so that he could focus on more personal projects with less expansive scope in the future. In the course of the full Wired interview, Miyamoto made clear that he was been planning to make this move for some time, and with the releases of new entries in both the Mario and Zelda franchises this year, he's confident that the younger designers on his team will be able to take up the slack.
But this morning, Nintendo issued a statement clarifying that position, explaining that Miyamoto would not be stepping down from his current position, but will be focusing more of his time on nurturing some of the younger developers within the company.
Here's the quote from the Wired interview that may have led to all of the current back and forth:
“Inside our office, I’ve been recently declaring, ‘I’m going to retire, I’m going to retire,’” Miyamoto said through his interpreter. “I’m not saying that I’m going to retire from game development altogether. What I mean by retiring is, retiring from my current position.”
“What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself,” Miyamoto said. “Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small.”
And here's Nintendo's response from this morning:
"Video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto's role at Nintendo is not changing. He will continue to be a driving force in Nintendo's development efforts. In discussing his priorities at Nintendo in a media interview, Mr. Miyamoto explained how he is encouraging the younger developers at the company to take more initiative and responsibility for developing software. He attempted to convey his priorities moving forward, inclusive of overseeing all video game development and ensuring the quality of all products. Mr. Miyamoto also discussed his desire to pursue fresh ideas and experiences of the kind that sparked his initial interest in video games."
[via Wired]
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