Shigeru Miyamoto was once, and occasionally still shines as, an entertainment genius. He’s the father of Mario and Zelda, and has pretty much been Nintendo’s creative force ever since he began his work there. Though Nintendo has its ups and downs more than any other console developer in the gaming industry, and even if Nintendo has left a bad taste in your mouth for years, it’d still be pretty difficult to imagine a gaming landscape without Shigeru Miyamoto. In an interview with Wired, Miyamoto revealed that we’re one step closer to that kind of landscape, for better or worse, as he stated he is stepping down from his current position at Nintendo and will be focusing on making smaller games.

For the uninitiated, speedrunning is a common practice in the gamer world where people attempt to beat games as quickly and efficiently as possible, leading to some very impressive results. Andrew Gardikis set the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning record at 5 minutes back in 2007, but he couldn’t recreate the feat at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. at Manhattan’s Nintendo World Store when Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was watching.

A booklet included in the garishly-named Super Mario Collection Special Pack contains Shigeru Miyamoto’s original plans for Super Mario Bros., which included Mario flying around with the help of a rocket and having rifles and beam guns available for use.

Pac-Man is Moleskine (Kotaku)

Miyamoto Wants to Make A Rubik’s Cube? (Eurogamer)

This Deer Made Out of Typewriter Parts is Adorable, Actually (Jeremy Mayer)

Hello Kitty R2-D2 (Yodaflicker)

Mark Zuckerberg on Oprah (Cindy W)

Avengers Hulk Will Be Mo-Cap (Blastr)

Samus and the Colossus (David-Hsu-Yen)

(pic (click to embiggen) via Wondermark.)

The iconic classic game designs that we take for granted and seem simple to us today were often the product of tremendous amounts of thought. If you haven’t read Nintendo design legend Shigeru Miyamoto‘s amazing interviews with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on wii.com, you really should; in this one, he talks about how painstakingly the first level of Super Mario Bros. was engineered to teach the player that mushrooms were good and not bad.

In this vein, Dutch gaming magazine Control has published some neat early sketches of Pac-Man as it was designed by Toru Iwatani. Again, the amount of craft in the graph paper sketches — really love the football diagram-like arrows depicting the ghosts in motion — is truly impressive. Note the lack of teleportation gaps from one end of the screen to the other. It’s also neat to see the honing involved in determining the precise proportions of our favorite pizza-shaped pill gobbler.

Full pics below:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 will be released on Sunday (or midnight on Saturday if you’re near Rockefeller Center in New York City and want to wait on line for a bit), but the gaming media has had it for some time now. Well, the NDAs are up, and the reviews are in.  There have been some worries that this Mario game would be superfluous, unnecessary — simply Super Mario Galaxy with more levels. This is the first time Nintendo has released two traditional Mario games on one console in 20 years.

Fortunately, according to some of the top publications in gaming journalism, Super Mario Galaxy 2 stands on its own, and much more.

In an interview with Edge Magazine yesterday, Shigeru Miyamoto made something of an alarming pronouncement.

Probably the other thing that we are desperate to realise is the core [online] business structure… Do we need to demand customers pay monthly fees to enjoy online activities? Or give an online subscription that is free of charge, but then offer something extra for people that pay, so that they get some extra value? With these core business strategies I think we are less active than we should be.

Does this mean that the free online gaming of the Wii and DS will go the way of the dodo?

Just before accepting his British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship yesterday, Shigeru Miyamoto was caught mentioning everybody’s favorite onion people by the Official Nintendo Magazine. From their Twitter:

ONM is at the BAFTAs! Miyamoto just told us Pikmin 3 development is “well under way”.

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This week, after months of anticipation, Sony revealed its new motion sensitive controller, the Move, at the Game Developer’s Conference. the Move walks a path already trodden by Nintendo‘s Wiimote, the primary controller for the Wii, and so, one might ask, how does Nintendo feel about this long awaited foray into their territory?

Predictably, they’re pretty calm about it. Motion sensitivity has been the Wii’s claim to fame, while other consoles have focused on HD graphics and processing power, but now Sony is rolling out the Move, and Microsoft is hard at work on its own motion sensing Project Natal. Kotaku asked Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, if this might mean that Nintendo should be looking to move into HD.

“For us high definition by itself is not the next frontier,” Reggie Fils-Aime… told Kotaku. “For us we need to provide a whole new compelling experience in our next generation.”

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