When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else’s. It flatters a vacant-eyed kid with a joystick (to say nothing of the grownups who have bought it for him or sold it to him) to think of himself, spiritually, as an intrepid spelunker. The cave, certainly, is an occasion for easy irony: the man who has perhaps done more than any other person to entice generations of children to spend their playtime indoors, in front of a video screen, happened to develop his peculiar talent while playing outdoors, at whatever amusements or mischief he could muster. Of course, no one in the first wave of video-game designers could have learned the craft by playing video games, since video games didn’t exist until people like Miyamoto invented them. Still, there may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind.

In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.” Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them. The pull used to extract quarters from your pockets. Then it became a force that pinned you to a couch. Later, it got your entire family to shadowbox in the living room. Whatever the interface, a great game invites and rewards obsession, and Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. Certainly, in Mario, the squat Italian plumber who bops around the Mushroom Kingdom in a quest to rescue Princess Toadstool, Miyamoto created a folk hero—gaming’s first—with as great a reach as Mickey Mouse’s.

What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other. (He prizes Nintendo’s financial and creative support for his work: “There’s a big difference between the money you receive personally from the company and the money you can use in your job.”) He has never been the company’s (or his own) boss, but it is not unreasonable to imagine that Nintendo might not exist without him. He designed the games and invented the franchises that caused people to buy the consoles. He also helped design the consoles.

In the gaming world, the creators of the games are not always widely known, much less venerated; the structure of the business, in which engineers and artists do their work for hire, and in which, increasingly, they do it in greater numbers, owing to the more complex technology of the games, consigns them to relative anonymity. Part of it, too, is that games are typically considered to be commercial products, rather than creative works; consider the fact that game titles, unlike the names of, say, movies or songs, appear in most newspapers and magazines, including this one, un-italicized and without quotes. There aren’t very many video-game auteurs, but Miyamoto is one.

The original Super Mario Bros. was the best-selling video game of all time, until Wii Sports surpassed it, two years ago—and Miyamoto was one of the leaders of the team that came up with the Wii. The Super Mario Bros. franchise has sold more than two hundred and forty million units, and that’s not including Mario Kart, Mario Party, and other offshoots, which have sold tens of millions more. Yet it is for the nature of his games, rather than for their commercial success, that Miyamoto is so widely revered. In a poll last year of nine thousand video-game developers, who were asked to name their “ultimate development hero,” Miyamoto was the runaway winner. “At the end of the day, most of the designers out there now grew up playing his games,” Will Wright, the creator of the Sims and Spore, and the developer who came in third in that poll, told me. “He approaches the games playfully, which seems kind of obvious, but most people don’t. And he approaches things from the players’ point of view, which is part of his magic.”

Securing an audience with Miyamoto in Japan is a little like trying to rescue Princess Toadstool. You must pass through a series of stages and contend with various obstacles and delights. The Japanese, by and large, aren’t accustomed to the way of an American reporter; it is unusual for them even to invite friends over for dinner, to say nothing of a gaijin with a tape recorder and a notebook. (An old Japan hand warned me, “Japanese people don’t generally ask questions directly about one another.”) The corporate ethos in Japan, and especially at Nintendo, is self-effacing; the humility that has kept Miyamoto at the company for three decades, rather than in, say, Silicon Valley, seeking his billions, also governs the apportionment of credit. Miyamoto has been a superstar in the gaming world for more than two decades, but neither he nor the company seems inclined to exploit his stardom. They contend that the development of a game or a game console is a collaborative effort—that it is indecorous to single out any one contributor, to the exclusion of the others. Miyamoto is also guarded about his private life. The fact that anyone would be curious about it baffles him.

The first time I saw Miyamoto in person was in Los Angeles last June, at the E3 Expo, the video-game industry’s annual American convention. It’s a huge affair, befitting a sixty-billion-dollar global industry. Nintendo, for its presentation, rented out the Nokia Theatre and filled it with nearly four thousand gaming enthusiasts, journalists, and executives. Early in the program, Miyamoto appeared on a giant video screen to demonstrate Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the fourteenth installment in the Zelda series, which he created in 1986, and which involves the adventures of an avatar named Link, who roams a fantasy world in an attempt to rescue a princess, Zelda. Miyamoto’s explanation of how to deploy the controls was dubbed with an English translation. (His father was an English teacher, and Miyamoto understands some English, but he can’t speak it well, and he insists on doing interviews and public appearances in Japanese.) With a zap, Miyamoto’s image suddenly disappeared from the video screen and reappeared below it on a scrim of white curtain, and then Miyamoto himself burst out through the curtain and onto the stage, to riotous applause. Grinning broadly, dressed in a white Zelda T-shirt, an untucked and unbuttoned dress shirt, and jeans, he wielded the Wii’s two controllers—the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk—as a sword and a shield. At fifty-eight, he is trim and agile, with a boyish mop of black hair and an easy smile. In public, Miyamoto often strikes a lighthearted crouching pose, a proto-Wii stance that seems to owe a little to the gunslingers of the first video game he ever played, Western Gun, and a little to Yosemite Sam.

As Nintendo’s creative taskmaster, Miyamoto had a hand in most facets of the development and design of the Wii, introduced in 2006. Internally code-named Revolution, it was the first wireless motion-capture gaming console; sensors allow players to dictate the movements of their onscreen avatars. The simplicity and dynamism of the controller, which Miyamoto conceived and helped design, attracted several new constituencies of what are called “casual” (as opposed to “hard-core”) gamers to video games—the Wii Bowlers and Guitar Heroes to whom the name Zelda may have still summoned up Mrs. Fitzgerald. (Miyamoto, in fact, named his Zelda for her.) “Our goal was to come up with a machine that moms would want,” he has said. The Wii has less processing power and graphic sophistication than rival machines from Sony and Microsoft, but it has outsold them by a wide margin, owing to its ease, sociability, and accessibility, and also perhaps to the misconception that, say, Wii Tennis is a form of exercise.

Wright told me, “Miyamoto starts from the kinesthetics of the controller. What is this thing going to feel like in my hands? Will I feel like I’m instinctively connected to this world? As opposed to, I’ve got sixteen buttons, and I’m trying to figure out which button does the super-thrust power-up, in which case it’s very cerebral, kind of like learning to play the piano. Rather than, you know, just picking up a shovel and starting to dig. He’s had an amazing impact not just on software and games but on the hardware as well.”

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At E3, Miyamoto said a few words in English but then went on in Japanese—a translator stood beside him—as he turned toward the giant video screen and demonstrated the new Zelda game. He guided Link through a landscape of cheerful menace, slashing at quasi-comical enemies. “Let’s take a look at these mushrooms,” the translator said, without affect. “Here we see the Deku Babas, popped up here.” Onscreen, giant carnivorous flytrap plants bobbed and weaved, and Miyamoto vanquished them with swipes of his sword. “You can let loose sword beams,” the translator went on. “If you look at the Bokoblins, you’ll notice that they are protecting themselves with their swords and they’re trying to block my attacks.” The Bokoblins, ratty sword-wielding soldiers, made an alluring squashing sound when Miyamoto killed them.

The sincerity with which everyone considered the Bokoblins or the Deku Babas, amid the pomp of a corporate showcase, was bewildering; it brought to mind some combination of Dungeons & Dragons and the N.F.L. draft. I am not a gamer. I took a few whacks at Super Mario, when it came out, in the mid-eighties, but mostly my video-game experience predated the Nintendo invasion and the unabating craze for home systems. I played arcade games, and I played them poorly; my quarters never went far. I usually wound up watching friends play, muttering over their shoulders in vain attempts to persuade them to play street hockey or Nerf football instead. The games were Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Robotron, Tempest, Centipede, Defender, Joust, and Galaga, which I did become passably proficient at and which, if I see it now, in a pizzeria or an airport, still inspires me to hunt for change. There was also Donkey Kong, which was unlike any of these others: it had a sense of humor, a narrative context, and beguilingly goofy graphics.

Although I missed out on all of it—not only on the brothers Mario and the Nintendo games but on Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, SimCity, and Halo—I saw legions get sucked in, and so I formed the not uncommon opinion that video games, like motorcycles or heroin, were irresistibly seductive and profoundly insidious. I had decided to avoid them completely, and, when I had kids, to keep them away from video games as best I could. This I have mostly done, but for the purpose of this assignment I’ve had a loaner at home—a Wii, with all the fixin’s. It will be hard for us to bid it goodbye.

Nintendo has been in the business of play since 1889. Its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, made playing cards, or karuta. Well into the next century, the company’s main product was hanafuda—cards made from crushed mulberry bark and lavishly illustrated with symbols such as animals and flowers— which replaced the painted seashells that the Japanese had traditionally used and which became widespread in Japan for gambling. As it happens, fortune and luck are intrinsic to the company’s name. Made up of the three kanji characters nin, ten, and do, the name has been said to mean “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Work hard, but in the end it is in heaven’s hands,” as the journalist David Sheff rendered it, in his 1993 portrait of the company, “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children.” (Sheff decided to write the book, which in spite of the title is generally admiring, after watching his young son Nic get hooked on Super Mario; Nic’s addiction, years later, to methamphetamine became fodder for another book.)

In 1949, Yamauchi’s headstrong and debonair great-grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, aged twenty-two, took over Nintendo and began restlessly casting about for ways to extend its reach. He secured a licensing agreement with the Walt Disney Company and scored a big hit with American-style playing cards adorned with the image of Mickey Mouse. Other entrepreneurial gambits—instant rice, a taxi fleet—fared poorly. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Yamauchi hired an engineer named Gunpei Yokoi and a crew of young tinkerers to think about making toys and games, and their experiments helped foster a culture of whimsy and risk amid Nintendo’s rigid corporate structure. As one of them told Sheff, years later, “Here were these very serious men thinking about the content of play.”

The very serious men turned out a succession of silly gizmos. There was the Ultra Hand, a device with a gripping hand at the end of it; the Love Tester, a primitive electronic contrivance that purported to measure the level of ardor between a boy and a girl; the Beam Gun, which used a ray of light to hit simulated targets. (Nintendo converted abandoned bowling alleys into “shooting ranges,” where you could fire at simulations of clay pigeons.) Across the ocean, a company called Atari, based in California, had created Pong, the first hit video game. Pong, originally an arcade game, was turned into a home version in 1975. Inspired by Atari, and by the craze for a new arcade game called Space Invaders, Yamauchi, who told Sheff that he had never played a video game, led Nintendo into the arcade business, and also pushed for the development of a home console like Atari’s, an apparatus that would come to be called the Family Computer, or Famicom.

In 1976, Miyamoto, then age twenty-four, was a recent art-college graduate, with a degree in industrial design and an enduring fascination with the Japanese comic strips called manga. He liked to draw and paint, make toys, and play bluegrass on the banjo and the guitar, and wasn’t sure how any of this was going to translate into earning a living. He had a vague idea that he’d create some kind of mass-market object. His father got him an interview with Yamauchi, through a mutual friend. Miyamoto showed the company some toys he’d made, two wooden clothes hangers for kids in the shape of crows and elephants. Yamauchi hired him to be an apprentice in the planning department.

What Miyamoto became, however, was Nintendo’s first artist. He started out by designing the console for a car-racing game, and then by conceiving the look of the attackers for a knockoff of Space Invaders called Space Fever. His breakthrough came after an arcade game called Radar Scope, which Nintendo had hoped would be a hit in America, failed, leaving the company with an inventory in the United States of two thousand unsold Radar Scope cabinets. Yamauchi tapped Miyamoto to design a new game to replace Radar Scope in those cabinets.

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The game he came up with was Donkey Kong. He had in mind a scenario based on Popeye, but Nintendo was unable to secure the rights, so he invented a new set of characters. The hero, the player’s avatar, was a carpenter named Jumpman. (Miyamoto had initially called him Mr. Video, with the intention of using him in every game, much in the way that, he said, Hitchcock appears in many of his own films.) Jumpman’s pet gorilla had kidnapped his girlfriend, Pauline, and escaped with her to the top of a construction site. The object of the game was to climb up through the girders while dodging the gorilla’s projectiles, and then vanquish the gorilla and rescue the girl. The goal, in other words, was to get to the end of the game, not just to pile up points. (“Donkey” was the word Miyamoto found in a Japanese-English dictionary for “stubborn” or “goofy.” “Kong” was a word for gorilla.) Prior to Donkey Kong, games had been developed by engineers and programmers with little or no regard for narrative or graphical playfulness. Donkey Kong, which débuted in 1981, had a story, a sense of humor, funny music (which Miyamoto helped write), and an ingenious game logic. It had four distinct screens, like a manga panel. This was also a new and soon-to-be-ubiquitous genre: what Miyamoto has called a running/jumping/climbing game, otherwise known as a platform game. At first, the Nintendo executives in America thought that Donkey Kong, as both a name and a game, was doomed. Looking for a better name for Jumpman, they settled on Mario, because of his resemblance to their landlord. To their surprise, the game was a huge hit.

Mario, of course, went on to bigger things. When Nintendo released the Famicom in the United States, in 1985 (it was rechristened the Nintendo Entertainment System, or N.E.S.), Super Mario Bros. was the game that sold the machine and in turn laid claim to the eyes, and the thumbs, of the world. The market for home games had crashed, and several companies went under or got out. Super Mario represented a re-start. Again, the object was the rescue of a maiden, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, or King Koopa, an evil turtle. Mario, now a plumber, and joined by a lanky brother named Luigi, bounced through the Mushroom Kingdom, dodging or bopping enemies in the form of turtles, beetles, and squid, while seeking out magic mushrooms, coins, and hidden stars. When you set down these elements in ink, they sound ridiculous, but there is something in this scenario that is utterly and peerlessly captivating. There were eight worlds, with four levels each, which meant that you had to pass through thirty-two stages to get to the princess. You travelled through these worlds left to right, on what’s called a side-scrolling screen. It wasn’t the first side-scroll game, but it was the most charming and complex. What’s more, the complexity was subtle. Yokoi, Miyamoto’s mentor, and the inventor of the Game Boy device, had urged him to simplify his approach. The game had just fifteen or twenty dynamics in it—how the mushrooms work, how the blocks react when you hit them—yet they combined in such a way to produce a seemingly limitless array of experiences and moves, and to provide opportunities for an alternative, idiosyncratic style of play, which brings to mind nothing so much as chess. Will Wright cited the theory of emergence—the idea that complex systems arise out of the interaction of several simple things. “The hardware wasn’t much better than Atari’s,” he said. “The polish and the depth of the games were. Super Mario was so approachable, so simple, so addictive, and yet so deep.” The game’s musical score, an entrancing suite by the Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, may be to one generation what “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was to another.