Miyamoto: “For A Lot of Us at Nintendo, It's Difficult to Decide What Cool Is”

Nintendo’s legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto thinks that the company’s games don’t fit neatly into any of the existing game genres popular in the market today.

“Nintendo isn’t one simple element of an overall gaming industry,” Miyamoto told the Los Angeles Times in an interview at E3 2014. “I really think there needs to be a Nintendo genre, that’s almost its own entity.”

As Miyamoto explained it, one of the big differences between Nintendo and other game publishers and developers is that Nintendo isn’t always trying to take its games very seriously.

“It’s not that I don’t like serious stories or that I couldn’t make one, but currently in the video game industry you see a lot of game designers who are working really hard to make their games seem really cool,” he said. “For a lot of us at Nintendo, it’s difficult to decide what cool is. In fact, it’s a lot easier for us to laugh at ourselves. It’s almost as if we’re performers. Our way of performing is by creating these fun, odd and goofy things.”

Nintendo’s Wii U has been struggling since it launched, but its “odd and goofy” games are starting to turn things around, according to Nintendo of America marketing executive Scott Moffitt. For example, Mario Kart 8 is off to solid start, selling 2 million units worldwide since it launched on May 30.

GameSpot Editor Carolyn Petit also thought that Nintendo won E3 2014 by having a little light-hearted fun instead of trying to go toe-to-toe with Sony and Microsoft.

Do you think the industry could use some more odd and goofy games? Let us know in the comments below.