Shigeru Miyamoto receives Japan’s Order of Culture
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has been recognised with Japan’s Order of Culture after nearly 50 years of shaping games and interactive entertainment.
Shigeru Miyamoto has been awarded Japan’s Order of Culture, recognising the Nintendo creative leader’s half-century contribution to games and interactive entertainment. In a press conference held at Nintendo’s Kyoto headquarters, Miyamoto described the honour as “a little embarrassing” but said he accepted it on behalf of the many people he has worked with over the years.1
The award is one of Japan’s highest cultural honours, and Miyamoto’s selection marks a notable shift in how game creation is recognised beyond the entertainment industry. The designer joined Nintendo in 1977, when videogames were still an emerging medium, and went on to shape some of the company’s defining characters and series, including Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda.1
Miyamoto told reporters that games are not made by a lone creator. He said he intended to represent the staff and collaborators who had spent decades building Nintendo’s work with him, rather than treating the award as a personal achievement. That instinct fits the way he has often described game development: as a shared process of designing systems, testing ideas and learning from how players respond.
From living-room games to a global medium
The conference also offered a concise account of how Miyamoto thinks games became part of everyday culture. He recalled wanting Nintendo’s work to sit comfortably at the centre of the living room, including for people who did not already consider themselves gamers. That goal influenced Nintendo’s long-running emphasis on immediately understandable controls and clear feedback.
Miyamoto argued that the medium has changed dramatically since he began working in it. Games were once treated as a niche or as a lesser cousin to the computer industry, but several generations have now grown up with interactive entertainment. Parents who played Nintendo games can introduce them to their children, while videogame ideas increasingly overlap with education, museums, films, theme parks and other forms of media.
He pointed to Nintendo’s experiments beyond conventional games, including educational projects and the audio and image guide created for the Louvre using Nintendo 3DS. For Miyamoto, those projects were not a departure from game design so much as another expression of the same interest: giving people a system, letting them act within it and making the response feel satisfying.2
Why *Super Mario* still feels immediate
Miyamoto also revisited the design thinking behind Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. A game needs to communicate its goal without forcing players to read a manual, he explained. In Donkey Kong, the story of a gorilla carrying off a woman made the player’s objective immediately legible: reach her and rescue her.
The idea for Super Mario Bros. grew from a more physical fantasy. Miyamoto described imagining a character running, jumping over streams and moving through a world that kept unfolding. The resulting game combined simple actions with a steady stream of discoveries, allowing players to build their own memories from the spaces they explored.
He also recalled a solution to one of game design’s practical problems: the final encounter with Bowser did not need to become a complicated direct fight. Letting the player leap over him and drop the bridge with an axe created a clear, dramatic conclusion while avoiding a more expensive battle system. It is a small example of the design principle Miyamoto returned to throughout the conference: a strong idea can remove complexity rather than adding more of it.
Miyamoto’s warning about generative AI
The conversation turned to generative AI and what it might mean for game development. Miyamoto compared the technology with earlier tools that changed creative work, including typewriters, word processors and personal computers. His distinction was between making something — deciding what it should be and why — and carrying out the work needed to finish it.
His concern is that production work can feel so rewarding that creators mistake completion for quality. If AI takes over more of the repetitive work, he suggested, designers may have to think harder about the intent behind a project and the choices that make it worth playing. Tools can speed up the process, but they do not remove the responsibility to decide what the player should feel, understand or want to try next.
Miyamoto also urged younger developers not to treat existing games as templates to modify indefinitely. Starting with the question “what would be fun to try?” can be more valuable than simply adding features to somebody else’s formula. That advice is especially relevant as large studios increasingly use established franchises and familiar systems to manage the cost and risk of modern development.
The next chapter is still interactive
The award arrives as Nintendo’s characters continue to move between games, cinema, merchandise and theme parks. Miyamoto said he once resisted making films because defining a character too narrowly could limit future game ideas. Over time, however, he came to recognise that fans often love the characters themselves as much as the systems around them.
That broader audience is now part of Nintendo’s strategy, but Miyamoto’s comments suggest that the underlying priority has not changed. Whether the format is a game, a museum guide or a theme-park attraction, the aim is to create an interaction that feels intuitive enough to invite people in and rich enough to give them something personal to remember.
Our opinion
Miyamoto’s Order of Culture award matters because it acknowledges the cultural work of game design, not merely the commercial success of a particular franchise. His most interesting comments were not about nostalgia, but about responsibility: make the goal clear, respect the player’s intelligence and keep asking what interaction adds that another medium cannot.
That philosophy is easy to summarise and difficult to maintain. Nintendo has not always been cautious or conventional, but its best work still reflects the principle Miyamoto described: start with a human-sized idea, make the response feel good, then let the player discover how much depth is hidden underneath. As AI changes the mechanics of production, that judgement may become the most valuable creative skill of all.