VLVL: Mario

[Doug Millison]

http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/

Profile of Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Nintendo's Donkey Kong, all the
Mario games and all the Zelda games.

"Before Donkey Kong," which debuted in 1981, explains Miyamoto, "those who
were making the video games were the programmers and engineers, not the
character designers and other artists." Miyamoto himself was   trained in
industrial design, not engineering. When he was put in charge of his first
game ("because no one else was available," he adds self-deprecatingly), he
couldn't  program. What he could do was conceptualize and design the game,
then pass his ideas on to programmers to actually build it. And so the
concept of a game artist, or game designer, was born -- of necessity.

"I was not an engineer. I was not a programmer. All I was doing was making
the designs, and I asked the programmer to cooperate with me to make the
game. Probably I was the first, or I was one of the first, game  designers
to have the discretion to make the game as a whole. So in those days I
sometimes joked that I was  one of the five greatest game designers in the
world -- simply because there were no other game designers in the world."


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