Shigeru Miyamoto's comments about the "lone genius" myth in a recent interview weren't a new position for him — he's been pushing back on that framing for years. But the timing is worth noting: at 73, Nintendo's most famous designer is still actively shaping how his own legacy gets told.
Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977, hired after impressing then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi with toy designs he'd made — this despite originally wanting to be a manga artist, and having studied industrial design rather than anything game-related. Nintendo at the time was a struggling playing-card company trying to break into arcades, and its early attempt at the US market, an arcade cabinet called Radar Scope, had flopped badly. Miyamoto was handed the job of turning unsold Radar Scope units into something sellable, and the result was Donkey Kong (1981) — the game that introduced a barrel-jumping carpenter named Jumpman, later renamed Mario. Donkey Kong didn't just launch two of gaming's biggest characters; it arguably saved Nintendo's video game business at a moment when the company had little room for another failure.
What followed was Super Mario Bros. in 1985 and The Legend of Zelda in 1986, both developed under the Creative Department that Miyamoto led — later renamed Nintendo EAD, and later still Nintendo EPD, the internal studio structure that has produced most of Nintendo's first-party output since. Miyamoto ran that department as general manager from 1984 to 2015, alongside titles like Star Fox, F-Zero, and Pikmin.
The "not a lone genius" point actually connects to something concrete in his career: when Nintendo president Satoru Iwata died suddenly in 2015, Miyamoto stepped in as acting president during the transition — a role that placed him, temporarily, at the literal top of a company built almost entirely around output from the teams he'd spent decades assembling and leading. His formal title today is Representative Director and Fellow, a step back from day-to-day management but still one of the most senior positions in the company. Games from franchises he created have sold more than a billion copies combined — numbers that make the "team, not one genius" argument land differently coming from the person whose name is most closely tied to all of it.