Nintendo games designer to get Japanese honour

The legendary games designer behind Mario, Legend of Zelda, and many other famous video games, will be given a very important honour in Japan next week.

Shigeru Miyamoto will be presented with the Japanese Order of Culture by the country's Emperor on 3 November, in recognition of his work.

It's a big deal, as not only is it the highest honour of this kind Japan can give out, but Miyamoto will be the first ever games designer to receive it.

He said he feels "incredibly awkward but truly honoured" to win the award.

But who is Shigeru Miyamoto, and how did he come up with some of the fantasy worlds you love to play in? Read on to find out.

Shigeru Miyamoto grew up in the Japanese countryside, in a place that used to be called Sonobe in Kyoto.

His hometown merged with some of its neighbours to become the city of Nantan in 2006.

Miyamoto studied Industrial Design at the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts and joined Nintendo as an artist in 1977.

This was only two years after the company had started developing its own video games systems - before then, it primarily made and sold card games.

In the early 1980s, very soon after Miyamoto joined the company, he created an arcade game with a character that would later become a household name - a villainous monkey called Donkey Kong.

Trying to thwart Donkey Kong was a man in a red boiler suit and hat called Jumpman, but that name didn't stick.

You may know him better these days as Mario!

Donkey Kong took the world by storm and it became a hit in arcades.

Jumpman was soon renamed. His new name was inspired by the landlord who owned the warehouse in which the American headquarters of Nintendo was based - Mario Segale.

And so, the Mario franchise was born. Wahoo!

Shigeru used inspiration from his everyday life for a lot of his video games.

One famous example of this is the Legend of Zelda.

As legend has it, Miyamoto liked to explore his local area in rural Japan as a boy.

There were lots of mountains and caves that he would play in, and he would make slingshots out of twigs he found lying round.

He realised these adventures he had in his childhood would be a great starting point for a video game.

In the Zelda games, the main hero Link is often figuring out puzzles in cave-like dungeons, using tools like slingshots, just like Miyamoto.

The first game in the series - The Legend of Zelda - was released for the Nintendo Famicom console on 21 February 1986 in Japan, then later released for the NES console.

And now, the Legend of Zelda is one of the best performing game franchises ever - it's sold more than 156 million copies around the world.

There's even a live-action film on the way, which is due to release in April 2027.

In his almost 50 years at Nintendo, Miyamoto has helped create hundreds of other well loved video games, such as Star Fox and Pikmin.

He's won many awards for his work, with the Japanese Order of Culture being the latest.

He said "I feel incredibly awkward but truly honoured to be selected for such a prestigious award," and went on to thank all the other people he works with.

The Order of Culture was founded in 1937, and is always presented on Culture Day in Japan, which is on 3 November.

Shigeru Miyamoto is the first person in the games industry to receive the honour, and it will mean he gets a payment form the government for the rest of his life.

The Order of Culture is one of very few awards that the Emperor of Japan presents personally.