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Story by Phil Owen

Wed, Mar 06, 2013 | 17:49 GMT

Miyamoto trying to prep the rest of Nintendo for his retirement

Shigeru Miyamoto, at 60 years old, is acknowledging that he won’t be working at Nintendo forever, and he is taking steps to get the company ready for life without him.

“This year I’m past 60; I’m going to be turning 61 this year. So for me to not be thinking about retirement would be strange,” Miyamoto said to GameSpot. “But in fact, the number of projects I’m involved in–and the volume of my work–hasn’t changed at all.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s not trying to force those under him to figure out how to do work without him around.

“Instead, what we’re doing internally is, on the assumption that there may someday be a time when I’m no longer there, and in order for the company to prepare for that, what I’m doing is pretending like I’m not working on half the projects that I would normally be working on to try to get the younger staff to be more involved.

“And this actually has nothing to do with any kind of retirement planning or anything of that sort, it’s really more of simply the fact that people have a tendency, certainly when you’re in an organizational structure, they have a tendency to always look to the person that gives them direction,” Miyamoto said. “And really, for a long time I’ve been thinking that we need to try to break that structure down so that the individual producers that I’m working with are really taking responsibility for the projects that they’re working on.”

That makes it sound like Nintendo leans on Miyamoto tremendously for guidance, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Still, how do you guys think Nintendo will do once he’s gone?