Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has decided to step down from his current position at Nintendo.
Despite stepping down, Miyamoto has plans to remain with Nintendo but in a smaller, more personal role. Rather than act as the Senior Managing Director and General Manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis and Development Division, he will instead stick to smaller development teams and potentially work on personal projects. This decision comes after many years of training young and aspiring developers that he feels are ready to take the reigns.
In an interview with Wired (linked here), Miyamoto indicates that he will not be retiring altogether. He hopes to begin working on a much smaller project sometime in 2012 and show it off publicly the same year.
Shigeru Miyamoto is often heralded as the “father of modern videogames” and has a number of iconic franchises under his belt. He is responsible for Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Starfox, F-Zero, and of course, Mario, among other franchises.
Image courtesy of Kotaku