Within any medium, regardless of whether it’s video games, TV, comics, movies, music, or something in between, there is always going to be a “tense relationship” between the “old guard” and the “new blood.” The latter is to be respected for all that they’ve done for the business, while the other is meant to keep things fresh and potentially surpass those who came before. In the realm of Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto is easily the biggest name within the company. In a way, he helped make the company, and his characters are still the most popular of the bunch between Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, and others.
But many people wonder if Shigeru Miyamoto is still “influencing” things behind the scenes like he’s done in the past with franchises like Star Fox, Paper Mario, and more. Thankfully, we have an answer to that from chief and programming director Yuji Kando, who worked on Pikmin 4. He talked with Game Informer and said the following:
I always feel honored to be able to work with Mr. Miyamoto. With that said, I hope people don’t take this the wrong way, but we don’t work on a game with the goal of “to make Mr. Miyamoto happy.”
The important thing is how deep of a discussion we can have about the game, and those discussions are the times when we see how thoroughly we thought through the game design. So in that sense, yes, we do get nervous going into a discussion with Mr. Miyamoto.
So yeah, they still talk to Miyamoto, but he doesn’t have the “final say” on this like he used to, and that might be for the best.