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Shigeru Miyamoto is on a short list of people who are gaming gods to me. Tim Schaffer, Will Wright, Hideo Kojima, Casey Hudson, Shigeru Miyamoto.

A gaming god is a person who makes games, does not apologize for their love of the games, does not allow the game to make them egotistical assholes, and keeps themselves grounded and humble when they are around the people that love their games.

If Sony had created Mii’s, within ten minutes of it’s announcment, Sony would have slammed them so hard that Bill Gate’s great grandfather would have felt it. So when Microsoft introduced Avatar’s, a sly little system that is sort of in between Home and Mii’s (More so with Mii’s) you would think it’s original creator would be pissed.

But this is Shigeru Miyamoto.

From IGN UK:

At its press conference on Monday, Microsoft unveiled the new Xbox 360 interface, complete with Mii-like character representations it called, simply, avatars. When we caught up with Shigeru Miyamoto this week at E3, we asked him what he thought about Microsoft’s new direction. Here’s what he had to say:

I don’t really use the term avatar to refer to what we’ve done with the Miis. We created the Miis with the idea that the people you live with in your house or family, you also live together with inside the TV, and you can use those characters interchangeably in the games you play. To see that a company like Microsoft has taken something we’ve done and kind of looked at it in a way and brought it out on their platform to kind of show that we’ve done has become the standard, I find quite flattering. But on the other hand, I think probably the basic ideas behind perhaps those two different systems are different and because of that I think they will probably develop in different ways.

How. Fucking. Classy. The man is the reason Nintendo IS, and why it sells what it sells. He had the perfect opportunity, (and some would say: the right) to beat the shit out of Microsoft. Instead? He took the high road.

Bless you sir! Thank you for not taking the low road! If you watched the entire Nintendo Press Conference, he was the only one that wasn’t smug. He’s a credit to that company, and I hope they know it.

Hawkes