Miyamoto Says Chasing Global Appeal Makes Games Generic

Shigeru Miyamoto has a simple answer for why Mario, a portly mustachioed plumber, became one of the most recognized characters on the planet. It is not demographics research. It is not trend analysis. It is fun, built from the inside out.

In a new interview with Famitsu, reported by Video Games Chronicle, the Nintendo legend was asked why the company’s franchises connect with players all over the world. His answer cuts against a lot of conventional industry wisdom about chasing broad markets.

Start With a Question, Not a Target

Miyamoto’s core argument is that Nintendo does not begin development by scanning what is popular and asking how to replicate it. Instead, the studio starts with a more elemental question: why do people play games at all?

“We don’t begin by looking at existing games on the market and thinking, ‘if we tweak this part or combine that element it would be fun,’” he said, according to a machine translation of the interview. “We start by asking: ‘What does it actually mean for something to be fun to play?’”

From that foundation, the team might look at trending games to understand their core appeal, or draw connections to older titles. But the originating spark is philosophical, not commercial.

He offered Splatoon as a clean illustration of this. The game’s entire premise came down to one question: what would happen if you made a game about painting a surface and competing for territory? That curiosity, strange and specific as it sounds, became the seed of a franchise that now spans multiple console generations. “If the core concept had been different,” Miyamoto said, “the result wouldn’t have turned out the way it did.”

Tajiri’s Bug Collection and the Lesson of Pokemon

Miyamoto was equally pointed about Pokemon, giving direct credit to creator Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood obsession with insect collecting. Pokemon Red and Green did not emerge from someone asking what kind of RPG would sell well globally. They emerged from Tajiri’s specific, personal desire to recreate the feeling of hunting for species you had not yet found, trading with friends to complete a collection.

“That’s exactly why Pokemon Red and Green turned out so differently from the RPGs that came before them,” Miyamoto said. The implication is clear: the strangeness and the specificity were not obstacles to success. They were the reason for it.

He also connected this to the RPG genre more broadly, noting that if you start with a fundamental concept and then shape it into an RPG, you get something genuinely different than if you start by trying to make an RPG and layering concepts on top.

The Seminar Advice Nobody Wants to Hear

Miyamoto says he takes this philosophy to external game design seminars, and the advice he gives there is not what attendees expect.

Most aspiring developers arrive with a game they love and ideas about how to make it even better. Miyamoto tells them to stop. “You shouldn’t do that,” he said.

His suggestion is to instead search for what he calls a “principle of gameplay” that only that particular developer has noticed. Something personal. Something that comes from their own experience of the world, not from their experience of existing games. He noted that at Nintendo this approach is considered standard practice, not some special creative technique.

The payoff, he argued, is distinctiveness. “If a game is remembered as a unique, entertaining experience, the more distinctive it is, the more deeply it gets imprinted in people’s minds.”

Miyamoto also took a moment to acknowledge the obvious absurdity of Mario’s global success with some characteristic self-deprecation. “People have long asked me, ‘why does a mustachioed middle-aged guy like Mario sell so well?’ and I always think, ‘that’s a bit rude, isn’t it?’” he joked. His actual answer: Mario was introduced alongside games that were genuinely, fundamentally fun. The mustache, it turns out, was never the point.

For studios currently trying to reverse-engineer the next cultural phenomenon from a spreadsheet, Miyamoto’s words from Famitsu might sting a little. But they track. The games people remember most tend to be the ones where you can feel that somebody, somewhere, really cared about a specific weird idea and refused to sand it smooth.