Despite having turned 71 last month, Shigeru Miyamoto has reiterated that he is still not ready to consider retiring from working at Nintendo.
“More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over,” Miyamoto explained to The Guardian. “In this day and age, you have to think about things in a five-year timespan, so I do think about who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen.
“I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on. These are things that have already gone out into the world … they’ve been cultivated by others, other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense, I don’t feel too much ownership over them any more.
“There is a scene in Iron Man where the president goes to his own company and the guard man doesn’t let him in, and he points at the portrait and says: ‘That’s me!’ But I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”
Way back in December 2011, Nintendo had been forced to deny that Miyamoto was retiring after his comments in an interview were misinterpreted. The late Satoru Iwata even went on to say that the story spreading like wildfire “once again reminded us how scary the Internet can be.”
Rather than step back from his current developmental duties, he intended to discuss how he was preparing his teams for the eventuality of when he would ultimately have to retire and, inevitably, no longer be at Nintendo as it continues on into the future.
