Great Chain Interview, Pt 1: Miyamoto Questions Metroid Director

Over the course of three days in Los Angeles earlier this month, one Kotaku reporter spoke to nine top industry figures and had each of them ask one question for the next guy. Shigeru Miyamoto started.

I had tried a chain interview once before. It was March. I still worked for MTV. I traipsed through the Game Developers conference stitching together an interview that began with Boyd Multerer of Microsoft’s XNA group, wound its way through Brutal Legend’s Tim Schafer, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, and ended shortly after Fable’s Peter Molyneux answered PixelJunk’s Dylan Cuthbert’s question about what colour underwear he was wearing.

I considered my first chain interview a success (though I regretted that it was an all-male thing). Crecente greenlit a second chain effort for E3.

You’ll get to follow the links in this chain all week, starting today with the kick-off. The chain began as Crecente and I wrapped up our 30-minute sit-down interview with Nintendo’s star designer Shigeru Miyamoto. As with most people, he laughed when I described the concept.

Because he was starting, Miyamoto didn’t get to answer a question. He was only allowed to ask one, for the next person I’d be interviewing, who happened to be on the other side of a wall at Nintendo’s E3 meeting area.

Shigeru Miyamoto, lead game designer at Nintendo asks long-time Metroid developer Yoshio Sakamoto: “When does he want me to retire?”

Tomorrow: the answer from Sakamoto along with two more links in the chain…