What better way to close off the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, than a keynote by the most revered game creator out there: **Shigeru Miyamoto.**

After a brief intro by GDC director Jennifer Pahlka and a retrospective of Miyamoto's work (featuring footage of classic Nintendo games, including Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, and more), the humble Japanese designer was welcomed with long-lasting applause and standing ovations.

Below, IGN64 presents the full transcript of the often humorous keynote speech, in which Miyamoto urged the game development community to design their games around ideas -- not technology. A refreshing departure from the show's previous keynotes by Sony's Phil Harrison and Sega's Bernie Stolar, who both focused on their respective next generation consoles.

After diligently waiting for the deafening applause to ebb down, Miyamoto started is speech in English:

"Good Evening! Thank you very much for your warm welcome. I am very happy to be here.

The video game industry has been through many crises, yet, has continued on as a strong and growing business. Thanks to that, I am still making games, and I get to speak to you about them today. I owe a lot to a number of people who have been involved in this business -- and also to the newcomers in this industry who have grown up playing Nintendo games and continue to purchase them today.

Making use of this opportunity, I'd like to speak about my own experiences for the past 20 years. If what I tell you today can help games to consistently be fun to play, it would make me happy. In fact, I like making games so much that I would do it for free, but don't tell Mr. Yamauchi that! [laughs] And now, I hope you will do me a big favor and allow me to speak in Japanese. My friend, Bill Trinen, will translate for me.

There are three main topics I'd like to speak about today:

• Looking back at the history of game designing. And what I think game designing should be.
• Ideas behind the creation of Zelda 64.
• My policy towards future creations."

[Japanese translation begins at this point.]

Until the time of Donkey Kong, which was the first game I directed, programming and hardware engineers were responsible for game design. Those were the days when these engineers were even composing the music and drawing the pictures themselves resulting in rather primitive, now classic, games. Weren't they terrible? [big laughs from the audience. Miyamoto quickly makes a gesture to make sure that developers present know he is joking.]

When I, as a graphic designer first became involved in game design, I used to boast to myself that I was one of the five best game designers in the world -- since there were few designers with artistic experience in game design back then.

Donkey Kong and other games gave birth to a new trend in which video games had an accompanying story for the first time, and the work of game designers came to include drawing the pictures and writing the story. This trend continued for approximately 10 years, during which time many designers joined the industry , and professional music composers also began to take a role in game design.

Then, due particularly to the success of Dragon Warrior and the Legend of Zelda in Japan, there emerged a new trend in which scenario writers took leading roles in game design. At this time I was inundated by many designers-to-be hoping to get their scenarios turned into games, and we also saw popular scenario writers teaming up with music composers in the hopes of churning out a game for the sake of business.

And in recent years, as I predicted, advancements in technology have once again brought programmers and engineers to the forefront of game design, and we are now in age in which we cannot accomplish anything new without these individuals.

Let us look back once again. In the days since I have joined the industry, we have also seen a qualitative change in the nature of game play. Early on, the objective of arcade style games was to see how many quarters we could get users to drop into the machines. It was with this goal in mind that we created the Donkey Kong series, but at the same time we encountered problems with new types of games that contradicted this model. One example is baseball, in which you must play 9 innings to complete a game, but at a quarter an inning one game is too expensive, while from the point of view of the arcade operator, players could get more play time for a 25 cent inning of baseball than they could on other games. Another example is our Mario Brothers, in which the players' objective was to defeat their opponent, but the better they got at the game, the shorter their play time lasted. Players had a hard time accepting these types of game concepts.

It was at this time that I became involved in the development of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which offered us an environment outside of the arcade for which we could create games. We put higher priority on developing two, hand-held controllers rather than a singe, ultra-functional controller to open the door to games like baseball and Mario Bros. With the NES, the business of selling game play time transformed completely, and evolved into the business of simply selling game play.

Throughout these changes I have maintained the same style of game design. Although I am not an engineer, I have always included in my designs consideration for the technology that will make those designs a reality. People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably.