In a recent interview with The Guardian, Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto revealed he's not quite ready to call it a career at Nintendo just yet.
"More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over,” Miyamoto told The Guardian. "In this day and age you have to think about things in a five-year timespan, so I do think about who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen."
"I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on,'" he continued. "These are things that have already gone out into the world … they’ve been cultivated by others, other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense I don’t feel too much ownership over them any more.”
This has been a common refrain from Miyamoto, who previously said he wasn't ready to retire when we interviewed him on the occasion of Super Nintendo World opening in the U.S.
Although Miyamoto has been an integral figure at Nintendo since joining the company 45 years ago and creating mega-popular game series like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, he's recently stepped back from his involvement in video game development. Instead, Miyamoto has set his sights on expanding Nintendo into different mediums like the Super Nintendo World theme park at Universal Studios or adapting its intellectual properties onto the silver screen with films like the Super Mario Bros. Movie and the upcoming Legend of Zelda live-action film.
"I don’t think of myself as a game designer. I’m about finding unique opportunities for Nintendo. The way things work here is that, more so than having a plan and following it, we come across certain things and from there, we try to find our own new path. The movies, the amusement parks, I’m excited to see what kind of organic things result from those," Miyamoto said.
"I’m still very new to [the movie] industry and I’m still learning, but I’m trying to read a lot of scripts these days and learn about how they are developed, to see how we can create uniquely Nintendo films."
Toward the end of the interview, Miyamoto jokingly said when he does retire from Nintendo, he hopes his illustrious resume won't be forgotten.
"There is a scene in Iron Man where the president goes to his own company and the guard man doesn’t let him in, and he points at the portrait and says: ‘That’s me!’” Miyamoto said. “But I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.