"I keep making games because people keep playing games."
- Mario creator and game design luminary Shigeru Miyamoto in a recent live Q&A, reported by Touch Arcade.
Nintendo is touring around the U.S., promoting its upcoming Nintendo Switch console along with Super Mario Run, an iPhone game due next week that is key to the company’s nascent mobile strategy.
As the game industry, technology, and player behavior evolve, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto understands the importance of keeping up with the times when making games. Also, he just seems to enjoy doing it.
"I keep making games because people keep playing games," he said at a promotional Q&A at the SoHo Apple Store in New York City, "and one of the reasons I like to continue to make games is because technology keeps evolving and I keep having my own personal life experiences and I keep looking for ways to combine the two into new games."
For Miyamoto, the continued relevance of Nintendo and its iconic characters such as Mario or Link hinges on technology.
"What I realized was that Mickey Mouse was a character that who had evolved with the evolution of cinema and animation," he said. "So it was then that I felt if I wanted Mario to survive as a character, Mario had to evolve with technology and video games."