Episode Details

There is a man in Japan who guesses the dimensions of everyday objects and carries a measuring tape to check. He is Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, whose franchises have sold over a billion copies. This episode traces his childhood wandering the Kyoto countryside without a map, the cave he hesitated to enter for days, his industrial design studies at Kanazawa College of Art, and the manga structure kishotenketsu he mapped onto level design.

We follow his 1977 Nintendo interview with handmade clothes hangers and toys, the Radar Scope disaster that left warehouses of unsold cabinets, and the partnership with engineer Gunpei Yokoi that turned a rejected Popeye pitch into Donkey Kong. Then we cover developing Super Mario Bros. and Zelda side by side, the battery save that broke the arcade model, Super Mario 64's virtual cameraman Lakitu and the analog stick, and how a sheepdog, gardening ants, and weight tracking became Nintendogs, Pikmin, and Wii Fit.

• How introduction, development, twist, and conclusion teach players wordlessly through level design
• Why the seesaw catapult was vetoed for 1981 hardware and replaced with sloped girders and rolling barrels
• Mario named after warehouse landlord Mario Segale and Donkey Kong from a word for stubborn
• The rejection of focus groups in favor of kyokan, a shared emotional resonance
• Testing games with the non-dominant hand to recreate a beginner's clumsiness