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It was when Kotabe arrived at Nintendo that he saw Super Mario Bros., the latest game designed by Miyamoto. But with little else to do, he accepted Ikeda's offer to join Nintendo, thinking he'd only remain at the company for a year or two. Though he had heard of Space Invaders, Kotabe had little interest in games.

Ikeda had seen that games were becoming more sophisticated, and that the medium needed the skills of seasoned animators like him and Kotabe. But Ikeda had since made the move into the burgeoning video game market, joining Nintendo in 1983 as the general manager of its new games division. The two had worked together at Toei Animation, with Ikeda having rapidly ascended from assistant to director and later company president in the anime boom years of the 1960s and 1970s. Ikeda, who was two years older than Kotabe, was also a veteran of the animation industry. While sitting in a coffee shop one day, Kotabe happened to meet an old work colleague, Hiroshi Ikeda.

But having slaved away in high-pressure animation studios for so long, he suddenly found himself with a lot of free time-it was, he said, 'a dull period.' The success of Nausicaä led Miyazaki and Takahata to establish Studio Ghibli in 1985.Īfter 30 years in the animation industry, Kotabe felt that his work had begun to stagnate, so he began to search for a new artistic path.

He also provided character designs for their TV shows Heidi, Girl Of The Alps and 3000 Leagues In Search Of Mother, and even animated a couple of key scenes in Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. When Takahata and Miyazaki left Toei in the 1970s, Kotabe followed, and continued to work as an animator on their Panda! Go Panda! short films. He worked with Takahata and Miyazaki on the 1968 film Horus: Prince Of The Sun. He'd served as animator on Wolf Boy Ken, Toei's first animated television series, and the directorial debut of Isao Takahata. By then well into his forties, Kotabe had spent many years working at Toei Animation, where he worked as a storyboard animator. Had he remained in animation, a highly successful career at Studio Ghibli might have beckoned.īy the mid-1980s, Kotabe was growing weary of the punishingly long hours and hard work required by the animation industry. He worked on some of Japan's most popular anime shows and feature films, and was a regular collaborator of both Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. But beyond that, Kotabe was one of the most talented animators in the medium's post-war boom in Japan. But even if you've never heard of him, you've certainly seen something he has designed or drawn: he is, among other things, the artist we have to thank for the look of many of the most recognizable characters in the Super Mario Bros. Unlike Miyamoto, Kotabe isn't a name that comes up all that often-even among dedicated gamers. That so many of his creations are still so familiar to us over 30 years later is a testament to the strength of Miyamoto's vision.īut there's another Nintendo employee who made a massive contribution to the company's history: artist, animator, and character designer Yōichi Kotabe. When Nintendo made the move from arcades to home consoles with the Family Computer (or Nintendo Entertainment System) in 1983, Miyamoto created some of its most popular games, including Super Mario Bros.and The Legend Of Zelda.

His seminal 1981 game Donkey Kong gave the company its first arcade hit, establishing a light, cartoon-like tone and a pixel-perfect level of polish that later games would follow.

If there's one designer who has shaped Nintendo into the video game juggernaut we know today, it's Shigeru Miyamoto.

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