Miyamoto: I wish I’d designed Angry Birds

Rovio’s smash hit Angry Birds series has received perhaps the very highest praise available in the world of games development.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary designer of Nintendo classics such as Mario Bros and Zelda, has admitted that he wished he had come up with the idea for Angry Birds himself.

There aren’t many games that I’ve played recently that have been truly convincing to me. But that said, I have very much enjoyed Angry Birds, especially the way in which it combines traditional and new game elements in exciting ways,” he told Hookshot.

Angry Birds is a very simple idea but it’s one of those games that I immediately appreciated when I first started playing, before wishing that I had been the one to come up with the idea first.

I mean, obviously I want to be the one creating the most convincing, surprising game ideas.”

Miyamoto went on to praise the game’s controls, though he couldn’t help himself from getting in one dig against rival Apple.

In particular the control scheme is excellent,” he admitted. When you analyse it, the controls are actually quite fuzzy in terms of the way that it works. It takes a little while to get used to the controls, I think, but once you’ve mastered them, you have a lot of precision.

To make it the interface and controls work that well and intuitively… well, I think a lot of work went into getting that right.

Obviously, if the developer had created the game for Nintendo DS the controls would have been even better, but what can you do?”