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# Shigeru Miyamoto

2026-10-21

Super Mario Bros.: How a 40-Kilobyte Cartridge Taught Humanity to Play in 30 Seconds Without a Single Word of Text

Ranked #27 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Super Mario Bros. (OVR 90.00: Impact 95, Experience 95, Originality 92, Scale 87, Durability 87, Business 85). After the 1983 Atari crash left North American gaming in ruins, Shigeru Miyamoto packed eight worlds, momentum physics, and World 1-1's legendary zero-text onboarding into just 40KB of memory—rescuing an entire industry.

2026-08-12

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 10: Shigeru Miyamoto — He Handed Over Mario's Day-to-Day and Kept Exactly One Thing: He Plays the First 30 Minutes of Every Game Himself

At 72, Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo's Executive Fellow and a Representative Director, and has formally stepped back from day-to-day work on the Super Mario series, handing it to a younger generation. He kept one action: he personally plays roughly the first 30 minutes of every game, to check whether it feels like Mario. He ranks 10th on our board, OVR 95: taste 99 and originality 99 are top of the entire list, while business 88 and scale 92 are the two lowest numbers in the top ten — the exact mirror of Gates (business 99, originality 94), written yesterday. This piece is about succession: the one thing a person keeps when they let go is the judgment they believe cannot be delegated.