Zelda producer sheds light on Miyamoto's famous tea table quote

Star Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto has said he regularly "up ends the tea table" on development teams, but Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma described this process as a "necessary ritual".

"When that conversation was presented, I think it painted a picture of Mr. Miyamoto’s role inside the company as coming in and being a really disruptive force in the development process," Aonuma told IndustryGamers.

"But I view it a very different way and I think a lot of people do. It’s that his time to come in and flip things on their head is part of the development timeline.

"It’s an event that happens. It’s almost a ritual in that sense.

"It’s a necessary process, because I find that when he offers that feedback, a lot of the time, he points out things that I, myself, was having trouble with and maybe felt that I couldn’t solve or didn’t have a good time for or felt like we didn’t have the time for and he comes in and really gives focus to everything.

"So I’d really like to reinforce that fact that I don’t view the process that people refer to as 'upending the tea table' as something unpleasant. It’s actually quite necessary and useful."

Miyamoto is the man behind many of Nintendo's most beloved franchises - Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, Pikmin, and Nintendogs among them - and serves in a leadership and advisory capacity to most of its internal development teams, as well as playing a major role in hardware development.