Shigeru Miyamoto, as big a name as the games industry has, has been absolutely instrumental in Nintendo from the NES to unreleased titles like Pikmin 3. His insistence is the reason the Wiimote has a speaker in it, the 3DS has a gyroscope and that you can slice the signs up in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So it’s a little surprising when he told French newspaper Liberation that he actually took a step back from the development of the Wii U:
For the GameCube and Wii I was really deeply involved from the start and the design of the structure and development processes… for the Wii [U], I would say it represents the beginning of a transition with younger generations of Nintendo engineers who have been more involved in the development of the project. I am still very present and engaged myself, but less directly. It’s like I stepped aside: I followed step by step work and gave them advice.
At 58 he’s no spring chicken, but I don’t think any Nintendo fans will complain if he decides to create characters instead of being as heavily involved in hardware development.