Japanese · b. 1952 · 1977 – 1985
Before becoming Nintendo's legendary game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto designed the original Donkey Kong sprites and cabinet art, establishing the visual vocabulary of the company's most enduring character franchises.
Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 as its first staff artist, having studied industrial design at Kanazawa College of Art. His early role was designing arcade cabinet artwork — the painted side-panel illustrations that attracted players to coin-ops before they had experienced the game itself. When assigned to redesign Radar Scope for the American market in 1981, Miyamoto created Donkey Kong's characters: the ape, the plumber (then called Jumpman), and the princess were designed as simple, easily readable pixel figures that communicated character and role within the pixel constraints of the era's hardware. His background in industrial design — concerned with how objects communicate their function — gave his character designs a clarity that competitors' sprite work often lacked. The Jumpman figure, carried forward into Mario Bros. (1983) and Super Mario Bros. (1985), set the standard for platformer character readability against which later games were measured.