Shigeru Miyamoto to Receive BAFTA Fellowship Award
While Nintendo paved the way for video games to hit a significantly larger market and eventually cause the rise of hard core games that many gamers now enjoy, the Japanese game company actually started making hits with very casual titles.
This is where Shigeru Miyamoto and Mario begun.
Now, over two decades have passed since Donkey Kong kidnapped the Princess and brought her to the top of an unfinished construction site and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts will be awarding Shigeru Miyamoto with the distinguished fellowship award.
This places the man at the same rank as creative geniuses such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. With BAFTA having started to recognize the many creative and artistic talents behind video games in the past couple of years, it comes as to no surprise that they are now paying tribute to the man who basically started it all.
Mario was not the first video game character. Donkey Kong was not the first video game. Before all that, Pong, Asteroids and many other titles have been around. But it was not until the arrival of Mario into the scene that the world of video games changed.
So what does this mean for the rest of us? Unknown to many, Shigeru Miyamoto is the genius behind the evolution of many video game genres. Super Mario Bros is considered to be one of the most important platforming titles ever developed. The Legend of Zelda has created the standard for what we know now as a real time dungeon crawler RPG.
Metroid set the bar for heaving deep storylines and an amazing ending –not to mention the pioneer for having a strong female character in the video game (a surprise fact that is revealed at the very end of Metroid).
Read more about Shigeru and BAFTA at the Telegraph UK.
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