![]()
1
Shigeru Miyamoto and the Art of Donkey Kong
Much of Nintendo’s success could be attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto (b. 1952). In the early 1980s, he created several highly popular games that helped vault Nintendo into first place in video game entertainment. His innovations also launched a race for performance that drove microprocessor development for the next two decades and led to some of the most important advancements in home video game consoles, high performance computers, and handheld devices.
When IGN Entertainment announced its list of the top 100 developers of all time, Shigeru Miyamoto topped the list. “It wasn’t a difficult selection. Nobody in the video game arena has proven as innovative and irrefutably influential as Nintendo’s legendary game designer,” IGN announced.
His track record speaks for itself. From the mind of a single, unwaveringly happy man comes such timeless franchises as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Through the years, Miyamoto has had his hand in just about every major Nintendo series, including Wave Race, Mario Kart, F-Zero and Star Fox. Yet he has never rested on his laurels, continuing to develop new ideas and fresh game concepts, including the 3D sensation that was Super Mario 64, the ultra-accessible Pikmin and the simply addictive Nintendogs. He brought the analog stick and the rumble pack to console gamers and he was integral in the advent of Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld. Even now, almost 30 years after Donkey Kong arrived in arcades, Miyamoto’s new software and hardware advancements continue to redefine the industry (IGN 2009).
Although Miyamoto’s early innovations saved the industry from mediocrity, they also spawned a performance race that drove up costs and made games accessible to fewer people. As more companies succumbed to the performance trap, it was Miyamoto who finally helped reign in the industry with products like the Nintendo DS, Wii, and Wii Fit.
Miyamoto the Artist
Shigeru Miyamoto grew up near Kyoto, Japan where he passed the time exploring caves and taking trips to the city to watch films. Although his family did not have a television, he was fascinated with comics and cartoons, particularly those coming from Disney. He even started a comics club in school where he and his fellow students could work together on drawings and animation.
He began his career with Nintendo in the late 1970s. At first, the struggling art school graduate did not impress company president Hiroshi Yamauchi. When Miyamoto arrived for a job interview with a bag full of toys he had designed, Yamauchi protested that Nintendo needed engineers, not artists. Yet because Miyamoto’s father was a childhood friend of the Nintendo president, Yamauchi offered Miyamoto a position as the company’s first staff artist.
Miyamoto spent the first years of his career at Nintendo designing artwork for arcade game cabinets. Then, in 1980, Yamauchi called Miyamoto into his office to get his opinion on a poorly selling arcade game called Radar Scope. Nintendo had produced 3,000 units of Radar Scope arcade machines, and most of them remained unsold. If something wasn’t done, Nintendo stood to lose a considerable sum of money. Yamauchi also worried that Nintendo might lose its opportunity to break into the U.S. market, which at the time was dominated by Namco and Atari.
Based on his experience playing games at the local arcade, Miyamoto found that most titles suffered from overly simplistic gameplay and excessive violence. He told Yamauchi that games could be improved if only they would follow the examples of classical literature and offer interesting story lines and complex characters. Radar Scope was a perfect example. As a clone of Space Invaders, it offered nothing new to game players. Games needed to offer players something different, something that would draw them back to the game and make them want to continue playing it.
Miyamoto’s ideas fascinated Yamauchi, who offered the young artist a chance to redesign the arcade game. There was just one problem. He had no idea how to create a computer program. Most people would have given up at that point, but not Miyamoto. He turned to the company’s engineers for advice and assistance and quickly learned all he needed to know to produce the game that we know today as Donkey Kong. The new game featured a hero, known as Jumpman, who had to rescue a damsel in distress from the eponymous giant ape.
When Nintendo’s U.S. sales force learned of Donkey Kong, they were dismayed. The game not only lacked proven features, such as bombs and missiles, it “had more in common with a Bugs Bunny cartoon than an apocalyptic science-fiction saga.” Yamauchi ignored their complaints. “He believes marketing people will only look at what’s popular right now, and if we make the game based on what’s popular right now, the game will not be new and fresh,” observed Nintendo managing director Hiroshi Imanishi. Yamauchi’s instinct was right. Upon its release in 1981, Donkey Kong quickly became a best-seller, with first year sales of more than $100 million.
Donkey Kong was certainly not a masterpiece of storytelling, but it was surprisingly developed given the limited hardware Miyamoto had to work with. He had wanted to create a much more elaborate game, but many of his ideas were rejected by Nintendo’s engineers because of the inability of the hardware to properly render the scene as Miyamoto envisioned it. However, the basic theme became a model for later titles that did conform to his vision, such as Zelda and Mario Brothers. “Gone was the open-ended ‘highest score’ criterion of previous titles and in its place was a more concrete goal: ‘Complete’ the game,” observed Andrew Vestal in The History of Zelda. “Games had evolved from just-for-fun endurance tests to simple narratives with (in the best Socratic tradition) a beginning, middle, and end. Gamers had a reason to play beyond simple continued survival.” Donkey Kong was also the first platform style game, the first game to use jump action, and the first game to use cut scenes to advance the plot and provide back-stories.
What was Miyamoto’s key to success and why had it eluded so many skilled developers? When Miyamoto stepped in Yamauchi’s office nearly 30 years ago, he certainly seemed an unlikely candidate for the title, “father of modern video games.” He had no idea of the complexity of computer programming or the limitations imposed by the primitive hardware that was available at the time. Instead, he had a vision in his mind of what the ideal game would look like, a vision driven by his artistic and musical talent, his broad exposure to classical literature, and his childhood fantasies. Already with his first game, Miyamoto was thinking beyond the capabilities of current generation game consoles toward a future of high-definition video and sound. The idea was not to create more games, but interactive versions of the fantasy films and stories he enjoyed as a child, and as soon as Nintendo began taking steps toward achieving that vision, there was no going back. Experienced developers, on the other hand, only knew the craft as it already existed. They were mentally restricted by the processes and values of their respective studios as well as the industry.
This reluctance and inability to pursue disruptive innovations that create new markets is rooted in Clayton Christensen’s perspective of firm capabilities. Christensen (1997) argues that capabilities initially reside in a firm’s resources— people, equipment, technologies, money, etc. Over time, the firm’s capabilities shift from resources to processes and values. As employees repeat tasks, processes are defined and embedded within the organization. As the business grows, strategies and priorities are established leading to the formation of values. When capabilities reside in processes and values, which are inflexible, sustaining innovations are possible and highly likely. However, this inflexibility makes disruptive innovation very difficult and often impossible to achieve. Thus, it appears that with many game developers, their capabilities supported the improved game graphics and performance that mainstream gamers valued. These same capabilities, though, prevented them from pursuing a disruptive approach to video games exemplified by the Nintendo Entertainment System and later by the Wii.
Robert Sutton (2002) of Stanford University believes that “another reason obsolete ways persist is that people become so skilled at doing things in old ways. Their deep competence at old ways and lack of skill at the new can mean that they perform worse when trying new (but ultimately superior) concepts, methods and technologies.” When successful technologies, products, and strategies are reinforced, it is known as the “success trap.” Companies that succumb to the “success trap” are often less equipped to deal with disruptive innovations that challenge the status quo.
One might be tempted to dismiss the success of Donkey Kong as a stroke of luck or genius, but what Nintendo did in the early 1980s has in fact been repeated many times throughout history. In numerous industries, profound leaps in product innovation often come from outsiders like Miyamoto. Patrick Regnér of the Stockholm School of Economics calls it “strategy making in the periphery.” Regnér (1999) found that innovations often arrive from the periphery of organizations, from subsidiaries and satellite offices where employees had more contact with the outside world and therefore with ideas that were different from those of corporate headquarters or insular research laboratories. “New information needs to be assimilated from outside the organization and industry,” notes Regnér.
Although Miyamoto worked at Nintendo headquarters, he was still an outsider in the sense that he was neither part of the senior level management team nor a member of the video game establishment. As an artist and musician with no formal training in computer programming or business management, Miyamoto was, in a very real sense, at the periphery of Nintendo’s strategy making. In other words, he was just the kind of person to bring fresh ideas into the equation. “The benefit of opening up your problems to outsiders is that in fact you can get novel solutions—quicker solutions than what the firm or R&D lab might develop,” explains Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. “It also opens up new domains for the pursuit of knowledge and activities” (Lagrace 2006).
Lakhani studied a number of companies in different industries and found that “innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines.” He cites one example of a pharmaceutical company that uncovered an unusual toxicology problem. The best toxicologists in the company could not solve the problem, nor could the academic consultants the company turned to, who were also toxicologists. After posting the problem publicly, a crystallographer came to them with a simple off-the-shelf solution. “The pharmaceutical company had never viewed the problem as a crystallography problem,” Lakhani noted. “What we don’t know is whether some firms may be large enough by themselves to already have the requisite variety and heterogeneity inside the firm. Could they first start by broadcasting problems inside?”
This is, in fact, what Yamauchi did when he called Miyamoto into his office to solve a problem that normally would be considered the domain of programmers, engineers, or even marketing managers. More than anyone, he deserves credit for approaching the problem with an open mind and trusting the vision of a young artist over the protests of sales and marketing managers who saw Donkey Kong as childish.
Yamauchi was a visionary in other ways. When most console manufacturers were cutting back production and facing mounting losses, he moved aggressively to develop his own gaming console. Owing to the large fixed costs associated with semiconductor development and manufacturing, console makers needed to place large orders to keep unit costs low. At a time when incumbent Japanese console manufacturers were selling less than 30,000 units, Yamauchi’s confidence in Miyamoto’s ideas led him to place an order for 3 million microchips from Ricoh, despite the fact that Nintendo had never manufactured a console of its own. Although many people inside and outside Nintendo thought he was being irrational, to Yamauchi the opportunity was clear. “I guarantee that it will sell a lot because of the great games,” he told a group of skeptical wholesalers. A few years later, Nintendo became Ricoh’s largest semiconductor customer, accounting for between 60 and 70 percent of the supplier’s production.
Mario to the Rescue
Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong to Coleco, an American toy manufacturer and one of the first companies to offer a home video game console. Coleco went on to sell more than 6 million units of the game. Nintendo then reinvested the earnings from its fledgling video game business into developing its own video gaming console. Meanwhile, Miyamoto was hard at work thinking up new adventures that eventually resulted in Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and numerous other games.
Mario Bros. was released as an arcade title in 1983 as a sequel to Donkey Kong. This time, the main character, known as Jumpman in Donkey Kong, was given a name (Mario) and a profession (plumber). He also gained a brother, known as Luigi, with whom he investigated strange happenings in the sewers of New York City. The game took place in expansive settings where pipes connected surface worlds with various underground locations. Previously, video games were set in confined areas that differed little from one level to the next. Mario Bros. rewarded players who explored new areas of the game. For example, a player could choose to travel over land, underground, or in the sky and arrive at the same destination. As such, a person could repeatedly play the same level and discover something unique each time.
The same year Mario Bros. was released, the North American home video game market experienced a precipitous decline as consumers grew tired of simplistic arcade games and diverted their attention to the newly emerging home computer market. Most console manufacturers exited the market either through bankruptcy or by refocusing on other product lines. One of the few survivors was Atari, which saved itself through drastic cost-cutting measures. Between 1983 and 1984, it reduced its staff from 10,000 to only 200. Former Atari developer Chris Crawford (1992) reflected on the situation in 1984:
The video game industry died in 1983; home computer sales boomed in Christmas 1983. The damage was greatest in those areas of computer gaming that were closest to video gaming. Most of the smaller publishers, and all of those who had specialized in skill-and-action games, went out of business. Those that did survive did so by cutting costs and having something other than games, or at least something more serious, to keep them going.
The reason behind the video game crash was not that kids had lost interest in games. Throughout the crash, video game arcades were busy as ever. The problem was that the video game industry was putting out too many mediocre games. Console games that were spin-offs of arcade games like Pac-man were poor copies of the originals, and original console games like E.T. were even worse.
Nolan Bushnell, the visionary behind Atari, sold his company to Warner Communications in 1976 and left the company two years later after Warner executives refused to heed his advice to lower the price of consoles and move aggressively into personal computers. “There was not a single innovation in the product line at Atari after the day I left,” he said. “Everything they did was just a variation on the chip sets and the business I created.” Unlike others who viewed home video games as a passing fad, Bushnell believed in the future of gaming. “Atari abandoned the game market to Nintendo, pure and simple … Atari could have been Nintendo and Apple under one roof”(Sheff 1993).
Yamauchi wanted to repeat the success of the arcade versions of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., only this time in a home console. However, he did not want to repeat the mistakes of Atari, Coleco, and others. At a minimum, for a home game console to be successful, it had to offer players the same benefits and features as arcade machines.
Unlike previous home consoles, the NES would be no toy. In fact, Nintendo went to great lengths to build an advanced console with all the makings of a fully fledged computer, such as the ability to add a keyboard, modem, and other peripherals. With such capable hardware, software engineers had the flexibility they needed to develop stunning games, games like nobody had ever seen.
Among the NES launch titles was one title that would change the industry forever—Super Mario Bros. With its release, Nintendo had done the opposite of previous console makers. Instead of making a stripped down version of a popular arcade game as Atari had done with Pac-man, Nintendo made Super Mario Bros. better than the arcade game it was modeled after. In fact, it was better than any arcade game, period.
Super Mario Bros. excelled on many dimensions. Its improved graphics, intuitive controls, imaginative story, and multiple levels all helped to win over the hearts and minds of gamers. It at once reinvigorated a dying industry and established a new genre of “action” games. “There have been quite a lot of games in the action genre,” noted Jun Takeuchi, a senior Capcom developer and creator of the Resident Evil franchise, “but I think the greatest achievement was Super Mario Brothers.”
This game really laid down the control fundamentals of action gaming. Mr. Miyamoto really understood the importance of the feeling of responsive controls when designing action games and put incredible effort into creating his control schemes. Pressing the jump button too soon or too late is no good. You have to be precise with Mario. This is something that has stayed with action games up to this point. (Stang 2007)
The title went on to sell more than 40 million copies and was one of the main driving forces behind Nintendo’s worldwide success. By 1990, Mario was more recognizable to American children than Mickey Mouse, and Nintendo was the most profitable public company in Japan.
People buy consoles to play interesting and popular games, just as they buy computers to run specific software programs. Hardware provides the raw power that allows games to perform their magic, but without the software, game consoles are nothing more than lifeless blocks of plastic, silicone, and copper. Proof can be found in a New Mexic...
