Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto saw games in the '80s becoming like "pornography": "I think the world of 'hidden secrets' in games has almost reached that same grotesque level"

Shigeru Miyamoto has always had a reputation for thinking outside the box, pushing back on prevalent game design trends, particularly in Nintendo’s very experimental Wii and DS eras. But his frustration with an industry chasing its own tail goes back decades. In fact, he saw the proliferation of samey games doubling down on the same concepts with increasing complexity as pretty “grotesque,” and not far off from pornography.

Yes, Miyamoto once compared popular games to porn. In a 1989 interview for a Japanese publication called Gamer Handbook, recently translated by Shmuplations, Miyamoto lamented that “games today are still based on the style of play from the 100-yen coin-op era.” Within that same “rigid framework,” everything felt like it had “hit a dead end and there’s nowhere left to go.”