🎮 For the past week, English-language Nintendo sites have been serving Shigeru Miyamoto to you one sentence at a time. Specs don't matter anymore. Remakes are fine, actually. He hates the word "depreciation." Each clip got its own headline. On July 27, 2026 Famitsu put the whole thing online, and read end to end, the 73-year-old turns out to be doing something none of the clips caught: filing a complaint about his own company.

Where this interview came from

Famitsu turned 40 in June 2026. The magazine launched in 1986 as Famicom Tsushin. Before that, Miyamoto says, Nintendo's products turned up only occasionally in general computer magazines. To mark the anniversary it ran an 18-page Miyamoto feature in its August 6, 2026 issue, on sale July 23, 2026, with Famitsu Group representative Katsuhiko Hayashi asking the questions. The web version followed on July 27, 2026.

They did it at the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Kyoto, the company's own archive building, which opened on October 2, 2024 in a converted playing-card factory. It's Famitsu's first solo sit-down with Miyamoto since 2020, the year after he became a Person of Cultural Merit, a Japanese state honour for contributions to culture and the first ever given to someone from the games industry.

Worth stating plainly: kantenna did not conduct this interview. Everything below is our reading of Famitsu's reporting, with the original linked at the bottom.

The entrance to the Nintendo Museum in Uji, Kyoto

Photo: Nagomijirap / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The line nobody clipped

Late in the conversation, Hayashi asks whether Nintendo's way of making things has been passed down intact. Miyamoto says he hopes so, and that he's working to make sure of it. Then he adds a condition. If all you do is keep going the old way, he says, you end up a hozonkai. A preservation society.

In Japan, a hozonkai is a real institution. Villages have them for a regional dance, a lacquer technique, a festival float. Volunteers keep the thing alive exactly as it was received. Admirable, and by definition not in the business of making anything new. Nintendo, he says, has lately been taking on more of that colour, and he says it with the word for regret attached.

Look at what's around him while he says it. The Star Fox released on June 25, 2026 is a remake of a 1997 Nintendo 64 game. A remake of Ocarina of Time was announced at the Nintendo Direct on June 9, 2026, exclusive to Switch 2 and, as of July 2026, still dated only as "2026." The film business runs on characters drawn in the early 1980s. And he's sitting in a museum full of his own back catalogue.

He is not being inconsistent. Elsewhere in the same interview he makes the case for remakes, and makes it well: five years on, plenty of players have moved past a game, and young players today have no practical route back to something from a decade ago. Rebuilding those games to be playable meets real demand, and knowing the originals feeds whatever comes next. He's marking where the line is, and admitting he isn't sure which side of it Nintendo is currently standing on.

The films are writing the release calendar now

According to the article, the new Star Fox started on the film side. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie script had a part for Fox McCloud, and the reasoning ran that if he's in the film, the series needs a game to go with it. The first Mario film and Princess Peach: Showtime! were built in parallel, with the two teams asking each other whether Peach should be more active on screen given what the game was doing. Yoshi's appearance in the film was locked early, and a Yoshi game followed: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, out May 21, 2026 for Switch 2 from Good-Feel. It is a causal chain everyone suspected and nobody had heard confirmed.

Sit with the direction of travel. This is a company that for decades kept its characters inside its own hardware, and whose stated worry was that licensing Mario out would restrict how Mario games could be designed. Films used to sit downstream of games. In 2026 the film script sits upstream of the release calendar.

The old rule about not mixing characters from different worlds still holds, with Smash Bros. as the standing exception and now Pikmin as the roaming one, allowed into anyone's world. Samus turning up, he notes, would get complicated. You can watch that exception settling into place in the Pikmin short films.

"Not failing is the biggest success"

Games, he says, aim for a huge hit. Theme parks and film ran on a different standard: the greatest success is not failing, so proceed carefully. He says the results cleared that bar and then some, and that he was relieved.

That standard is worth holding up against the numbers, because by it the Galaxy Movie is a triumph and by most others it's complicated. It crossed $1 billion worldwide in its tenth weekend against a $110 million budget, while carrying a 43% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic of 37. Nintendo's film operation is engineered not to lose. Being loved is a separate project.

The theme park story goes back further than the Universal deal. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president who turned a playing-card maker into a game company, once floated the idea of a Nintendo park in Kyoto. Miyamoto says they wanted one for years, but the business runs at the scale of the tourism industry, and hiring and financing tens of thousands of people was never Nintendo's model. So they waited for the right partner. On film, he says the outline was worked out over several years with Satoru Iwata, who was Nintendo's president from 2002 until his death in 2015. About twelve years have passed since then, with the pace deliberately sped up and slowed down to keep the gaps filled.

The part where he goes after the finance department

Then he says the thing that got picked up everywhere, and it lands harder in context. He hates the words "depreciation" and "recouping costs." His reasoning is that the people funding a project are in it for a big win, so treating "we made it back" as good news is strange. A lot of talent got consumed to produce a break-even. That, to him, is the failure.

What he wants instead is a backer who comes back and says it took a while, but you made me a fortune. And he ties it to something less obviously commercial: the most local thing a person has, a private hobby nobody asked about, is what tends to travel globally. Copy the things that seem to travel and you get work nobody in particular made, which is exactly what fails abroad.

Plenty of studios have spent the last two years explaining cancellations and layoffs to their players, which makes this a pointed thing for someone at his level to say into a microphone. It is also easier to say from inside a company with one of the healthiest balance sheets in the industry.

What "new" looks like to him: a few hundred bytes

Asked what else Nintendo should be putting in front of families, he points at Alarmo, the motion-sensing alarm clock Nintendo launched on October 9, 2024 at ¥12,980. In Japan it stayed behind a Nintendo Switch Online membership for months before general retail opened on May 22, 2025. Nintendo barely promotes it, he says, and calls it a genuine invention.

Then the interview goes somewhere strange. He plays Pikmin Bloom, the mobile game built with the studio formerly known as Niantic, whose games team Scopely bought and renamed Scopely Explore in July 2026. At the mushroom challenges in Kyoto he watches who shows up by nationality: a Taiwanese wave, a Korean stretch, and lately Western names. What pleases him is that Western players now build their Miis with real care, which he says used to be a known weak point.

Then the engineering detail. A Mii is a few hundred bytes, because the Wii Remote had to hold dozens of them, and Nintendo is a company that obsesses over squeezing maximum effect out of minimum memory. Hundreds of millions of Miis, he points out, would still fit almost nowhere. And he wonders aloud whether a Mii might one day be attached to a personal ID worldwide.

He frames it as a thought he enjoys rather than a plan, and adds that this sort of thing is better off spreading than being kept as a trade secret. It is still a startling place for a games interview to land in 2026.

Seventy-three, and studying the butterfly

He isn't planning to direct again. His last deep involvements were Super Mario Run and Pikmin Bloom, both mobile, both of which he says he's glad he got to make. A game now means steering something like 200 people. Running a film set day to day, he says, is beyond him.

What he is doing is researching the butterfly stroke after 70. Adjusting his form slightly each session to get through 25 metres. Watching swimmers on YouTube. Being told by a coach that his spine isn't moving flexibly, and having no idea what to do about it. He says he's always liked being taught things, going back to skiing and guitar, and that he prefers practice to performing.

His advice to each year's roughly 200 new hires is to find something that makes Monday appealing, anything at all, even someone interesting on the bus. And his closing message is that making something from zero is the fun part, and its opposite is making something well. He wanted to be a manga artist, copied better artists, never got good enough, and calls that lucky. If he could have drawn like them, he'd have spent his life trying to be them.

A 73-year-old at the top of the industry, standing inside a museum built out of his own back catalogue, saying out loud that his company has been feeling a little too much like a preservation society. In Japan that reads as the highest form of self-criticism, delivered with a laugh so nobody has to acknowledge it directly. Where you're reading this, when a studio you love announces another remake, is that a gift or a stall? And is anyone there willing to say so with their name on it?

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