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Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has expressed an ambition to take its properties into “a variety of settings,” adding to the company’s expansion into new media (via Nintendo Everything; Nintendo Everything).
Last year, Miyamoto was honoured with the title of Person of Cultural Merit. This is one of the highest honours that a creative is able to receive from the Japanese government, and he said that he “won’t be retiring anytime soon.” He elaborated on his intentions for the future: “I intend to keep trying to create something new that brings smiles to people around the world without focusing too much on what we have already created.” In this interview from the latest issue of Famitsu, the director iterated that Nintendo is taking its acclaimed franchises into new avenues of production.
“We want to expand our video game characters to a variety of settings—not just in games, all while keeping their value. In other words, we’ll be collaborating with various other companies. If we’re able to accomplish that, we can create more opportunities for people to make contact with our characters on a much larger scale than usual,” explained Miyamoto. Expectedly, Miyamoto is the “Mario” man, which means he decides where the property goes and how it is represented. “I’m very hands-on with something like ‘Super Mario Run,’” he exemplified. “No one else could have answered the question of, ‘What do we exactly do with a mobile Mario game?’”
In addition, the Mario movie adaptation came into conversation, and Miyamoto said that the film and animation studio Illumination is the right fit for the project. “So I met with [CEO of Illumination Chris Meledandri] and talked. He brought things with him that I had mentioned in interviews in the past to say that our ways of thinking and doing things are one in the same,” he revealed. “I didn’t know what kind of angle he was getting at, but I’ll never forget when he talked to me about why he had failed before. That’s when I thought, ‘I think I can trust this guy.’ That was right around the time I was considering movies, so we decided to have him do the animation for us when he said, ‘What do you say? Let’s make something together.’ It took a really long time for things to come together, but we finally found our way.”
Illumination has produced the Despicable Me series, The Lorax, The Secret Life of Pets series, and The Grinch. Though we don’t know much about the upcoming adaptation, it seems that Illumination has the family-friendly focus that Nintendo holds as one of its core tenets. It’s set to release in 2022, and Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World theme park will open to the public in spring 2020.
