Feature: Keza MacDonald On Meeting Miyamoto, 'Switch 2', And Her Upcoming Nintendo Book

The London Developer Conference (LDC) made its almighty return last week, allowing some of the biggest names in the gaming world the chance to talk about the industry, where it currently sits, and where it is likely to go.

One of the speakers in this year's programme was Keza MacDonald, video games editor for The Guardian and author of 2020's You Died: The Dark Souls Companion book.

After presenting a 'Fireside Chat' to the LDC audience, Keza kindly agreed to sit down with us to talk about her next book, Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun as well as chat about the company more generally and her hopes for the future (yes, including 'Switch 2').

Our conversation covered a range of topics including balancing work and personal life, Zelda remakes we'd love to see and Keza's experiences of meeting Shigeru Miyamoto. Enjoy!

Nintendo Life (Jim Norman): Starting with the big question: Why Nintendo for this book?

Keza MacDonald: So, apart from the fact that I'm a big Nintendo nerd and I've been playing Nintendo games since I was six, for me, if you want to understand people, you need to understand "play". Because we're one of three species that "plays" into adulthood. And if you want to understand play, you need to understand video games, which a lot of people still don't. And then if you want to understand video games, you've got to understand Nintendo, because, for me, Nintendo is like the 'firmament' of games. It essentially set the blueprint for modern gaming.

If you look at Nintendo's history, time and time again it's been ahead of the curve. Nintendo ushered in the expansion of the gaming audience with the Wii before people knew that was a thing that needed to happen. If you look at Nintendo games such as Animal Crossing, that game makes perfect sense in 2024, but it originally came out [in Japan] on the Nintendo 64!

So many of Nintendo's ideas end up being things that are now the standard for games, foreshadowing trends that become industry-defining. So for me, Nintendo is the way you understand games. You look at what Nintendo does now, at what it's done for the last 20 years, and you understand how gaming has made its way into the centre of modern culture and life.

Being such a fan of Nintendo, what was the research process like for this book?

I got my first job on a games magazine, (GamesTM, RIP) when I was 16 years old. I did work experience and was asked to stay for an extra week. Then, at the end of that week, they said, "Do you want a job?" and I just quit school.

This is not what happens anymore. It's a real shame that you don't hang around on forums and then do work experience. I do not know how people get into game journalism anymore!

So I've been covering Nintendo games professionally and interviewing Nintendo developers for nearly 20 years. I have this massive cache of interviews with people like Eiji Aonuma [Current Legend of Zelda series producer] and other Animal Crossing creatives from the DS and Wii era. It paints a really interesting picture, looking at all that stuff that I've done for my job.

Nintendo's history of success and failure is integral to how you understand that company

So I've been looking back at everything I've ever written about Nintendo, which is a lot. I think I've interviewed pretty much everyone at Nintendo who you would want to at this point. It's a huge privilege. I think that there's a lot of really interesting stuff in those interviews, so that's been a lot of my research.

I've also been going and reading what everybody else has ever interviewed Nintendo about. There have been a couple of good books about Nintendo and some of them are quite old now. Chris Kohler's [formerly of Wired] book, Power-Up, is a really interesting one because it was about Nintendo in a different era.

Then I have actually been playing quite a lot too. I'm someone who doesn't stick with the same game for very long. Generally, I will play it and I'll move on. I was trying to at one point make a list of all the Nintendo games that I can remember playing and then a list of all the ones I've never played that I would like to. Getting through that would take a lifetime I think, especially as I have two small children now. But I have been playing quite a lot of things that I had forgotten, but that were joyful at the time. I spent a lot of time with Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan recently, for instance.

As you said there, Nintendo has a lot of games split across many franchises. How did you go about whittling that massive list down into 12 for this book? I assume it was quite the challenge.

It was because I love Nintendo! Games that, to me, are super interesting and I could easily write 5,000 words on, are maybe not the ones that other people might want to read about, right? So some were obvious: Zelda, Mario, Pokémon, and others are a way for me to talk about a topic that is "vital video games".

You might not expect to see Nintendo Labo as one of these 12 games, but for me, that's a way to talk about Nintendo's way of hardware innovation. It's a way to talk about how Nintendo views the physical controller, the physical actions of play, and also about Nintendo's history as a toy maker.

You might not necessarily expect Metroid there, but Metroid is a really interesting way to look at not just the sprawling evolution of the concept of a game map, but also gender in games, how that's shown up in Nintendo games throughout the years, and how it's changed quite a lot.

Basically, some of the games are the obvious ones that you just have a ton of material on, while others provide an interesting way to talk about how games have made their way into our lives.

Of those hundreds of franchises that Nintendo has produced over the last 30 years, there are some that have been pushed to the side — shout out to Star Fox and Kid Icarus. Are there any that you regret not being able to include in this book?

Star Fox is one. I love the development story of Star Fox on the SNES and how Dylan Cuthbert and the other British teenagers from Argonaut were just transported to Kyoto to help them make this game. But it's been hard to whittle it down because the book needs to say something broader about games as well and there's limited space. So there are ones that I think are really interesting, but they don't necessarily say anything broader about Nintendo as a company, or about video games as a whole. The ones that have fallen by the wayside are the ones that are interesting stories by themselves, but don't go broader.

Nintendo is a company of two sides. It's obviously had massive successes, but then it's also had some flops. How have you navigated those two viewpoints in this book?

So for me, Nintendo's history of success and failure is integral to how you understand that company. That is not a bug, that's a feature of how Nintendo operates. Nintendo chooses an idea and it goes for that idea. People often say that Nintendo operates in a vacuum, and I don't think that it necessarily does. But it does commit to its ideas because Nintendo does not financially "bet the farm" on any single console. The ones that are successful bankroll the ones that are not and it allows them to innovate and follow quite wild ideas. Like, WarioWare Twisted! — who would have come up with that!?

I genuinely could talk about Nintendo forever

I think Nintendo Labo is a brilliant example of this, which is why I chose it for the book. But these ideas are just like, "what?". Very occasionally, one of them will be a multi-million seller, like the Wii Fit Balance Board. But the fact that Nintendo prioritises innovation, ideas and creativity, frees it to fail.

Failure is an integral part of the Nintendo story. It throws creative ideas out, some of them stick and some of them don't, but that's a characteristic of Nintendo. It frees them from what a lot of other game companies have to do, which is only go for things that they already think will be successful. That's not how you innovate.

From failures to successes: you've written a book! Congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about the writing schedule behind this book? Because you're a busy person, you have a busy life and you write for The Guardian as well.

I co-wrote a book in 2016 about Dark Souls with a very talented writer called Jason Killingsworth [founder and creative director at Tune & Fairweather]. With that book, I didn't have any children and I was in my 20s, so I did it by finishing my job, maybe having some dinner and then going to my little office and writing until three in the morning every day for four months. Completely normal non-workaholic behaviour. General advice: don't do that at all. Never do it.

For this one, I had to be much more structured. I took a full month off from my day job to get the bones of the book down and since then I've been taking a couple of days each week to really concentrate on it. For me, if I'm writing a big project, I have to concentrate on it properly. I'm not someone who can do 500 words a day. Some writers do work like that, but I can't. I have to be all in on it. I've had to construct time that's clear of other things for me to be able to concentrate, but then when I can concentrate, I can work real fast.

It also helps that I genuinely could talk about Nintendo forever. I did a bunch of research, but it's not something I've had to learn about from the ground up. I've had an idea for this book in my head for six years, so by the time I signed the contract with Faber, I was ready to go. A lot of it was already kind of sketched out, so that helped.

But writing a book is horrible. It's like having the hugest homework assignment you can possibly imagine and it lasts for like a year.

Can you tell us a little bit about the publishing process going forward? Because it doesn't come out until spring 2026.

...the story of Mario is essentially the story of the birth of modern video games

I'm hoping it'll actually be late 2025, but it might be spring '26. The publishing world is extremely slow. Between you finishing your manuscript and the book coming out is probably 18 months, which is where I'm at right now. But it depends on the publisher's marketing schedules honestly, because they've got a lot of books coming out. You're not going to get the Christmas slot because that's going to be, I don't know, the biography of Obama or something.

It's very strange because with online journalism, which is mostly what I've been doing for all of my adult life, you do a thing, put it online, and get immediate feedback. The space between having the idea for a thing and it being up is maybe a week or maybe a few hours depending on what you're doing. But then books take so long. And then it's another year before it comes out in paperback so it really is a marathon effort! But I do find it very rewarding because it's a different kind of work. You don't have to look at Twitter, for a start.

That's the dream!

Exactly. You can think about things and you can spend much longer than you normally would on them. I'm used to working to such tight deadlines all the time, and the newspaper is daily. I worked at Kotaku before this and that was just loads of stuff. That's how my brain works because I've trained it to do that, but having the space to have a bigger project is actually really nice.

You mentioned your Dark Souls book, You Died, earlier. If you were to choose to dedicate an entire book to a Nintendo franchise, what would it be?

I think I would pick Zelda. If I were going for the one that would sell best, I'd pick Mario.

Honestly, I don't know what the cover's going to look like for this book yet, but I would be so surprised if it doesn't have Mario on it because the story of Mario is essentially the story of the birth of modern video games and it's of immense historical interest.

But with Zelda, you could go further than just the games. You could talk about how it's influenced film and fantasy, and I think it's influenced how a lot of people think about a lot of stuff. Especially in the next few years, we're going to see how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have influenced how a whole generation of people think.

So yeah, I'd pick Zelda. Partly because it's my favourite, but also because it's the one that people feel most. People get really poetic when they talk about Zelda because it means a lot to them. No one's that poetic about Mario. I say that, but there was an entire book of poetry based on Super Mario World called If All the World and Love Were Young. I read that poetry book, and there's a quote from it at the beginning of the Mario chapter.

With Zelda, there are enough games and you could talk about each of them, but then I also think that it's the most meaningful Nintendo series for a lot of people.

If I had to pressure you to pick out the headline Zelda game, what would you go for?

That's so hard because my favourite one is Majora's Mask, but that's not the one anyone's buying a book about.

I think Nintendo has entered a safer era in the past five years

But seriously, no one's done Majora's Mask again yet. With all of the other Zeldas, you can point to the likes of Okami or a bunch of other games that have kind of just "done it again", but in their own way, obviously. But no one really took Majora's Mask and ran with it.

I just think that's fascinating because it was such an interesting idea at the time. There was that brief section of time loop games that we got with Deathloop, Twelve Minutes and a few others, but nobody has done the concept of Majora's Mask since.

Perhaps it's because it's so heartbreaking.

A lot of people say it's a really bleak game, but I think it's actually quite hopeful.

There's that one side quest where you get the couple together by day three, and then you have to reset time and see them again.

Or if you wait until the end of that day after you've got them together, you watch them hold each other as the moon destroys it. It's just... oh my god. You don't get that from Mario!

We'll have to move on because otherwise, I'll be in tears. You've covered Nintendo for the past 20 years and there have been a lot of surprises in that time with weird consoles, weird games, and weird business decisions. What has been the biggest surprise to you?

The Nintendo DS. Oh, or maybe the Wii. I remember sitting in the newsroom at my first job, it was during the Tokyo Game Show, and the Wii was announced. Nintendo didn't show any gameplay, they didn't show a console, they just showed people waving their arms around. And I remember everyone in the room being like, "This is the dumbest s**t I've ever seen in my life". They thought it was just an absolute clown show. I was about 17 and a big Nintendo fan so I was tempted, but I didn't know what to think.

But then I remember seeing the DS and I imported one from Japan. That thing is a smartphone! It's just wild the extent to which it predicted the idea of a touchscreen gaming device. I actually think that DS, especially in Japan, was more than a games console. Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training is a really important game in Nintendo's history because it presaged the idea of puzzles on your phone — all the things that people do now.

It was a surprise because everyone was expecting a new Game Boy. The Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance had been smash hits, so why wouldn't you just make a new Game Boy? The fact that they didn't call it a Game Boy, the fact that they went with the dual-screen touchscreen thing. When it arrived, I remember feeling like it was an artefact from space.

Nintendo surprises us all, doesn't it?

The first game I played on it was a really obscure one called Jam With the Band which was Japan-only at the time. The second game I ever played on my DS was Another Code, which just blew my mind. But Jam With the Band was like a MIDI music synthesiser. It was kind of a rhythm action game, but you and four other people could play the different instruments in the band. You'd play, I don't know, the theme tune to Fullmetal Alchemist, but through four really crappy little DSes. I just loved it. I thought it was great.

I think that the DS was even more of a surprise because I kind of knew about the Switch before it was announced just through being in the industry. But the DS was pre-social media, so when it arrived, I hadn't already seen 4,000 videos of it. I kind of miss that era.

And, of course, Nintendo would go on to add a fancy camera to the DS and make it 3D.

Yeah! The 3DS was also, "just why?" It's such a good idea and again, Nintendo wasn't betting its entire farm on 3D being a thing. They were happy to make one 3D console and then move on to something else.

That's the surprises that have happened before but let's talk a bit about what's to come. What are your hopes and dreams for the 'Switch 2'?

I'm so, so interested because I know nothing about it. I was at Nintendo HQ a few months ago and I still know nothing!

I'm interested because I think Nintendo has entered a safer era in the past five years — definitely since [Satoru] Iwata's very sad passing. In the era that it's in now, there are quite a lot of "big" franchises and a bit less "weird" Nintendo going on. I think this is quite a common observation.

I wonder whether Nintendo's going to totally break the mould of its entire history and release something that's basically an update of the Switch that's backwards compatible. That would be the smart thing to do. There's still plenty of mileage in the Switch in terms of the hybrid console and I don't think they're going to move away from it. That was a stroke of absolute genius and I think they'd be mad to abandon that strategy.

As to how they do it now, I don't know. I think it might be the first time that I look at a Nintendo console and don't see something completely different. I think it might look kind of similar. But then Nintendo surprises us all, doesn't it?

It likes to go for one smash hit, one 'what the hell?!'

Yeah, exactly. That seems to be almost the pattern, doesn't it? But also, Nintendo's making a lot of money these days from things that aren't gaming. Miyamoto's not really involved in game development any more — he is, because he's Miyamoto and he can't help himself — but his job now is finding creative opportunities for Nintendo outside of games.

A lot of the Nintendo creative elders have kind of passed the torch. It's really interesting that when you interview someone like Eiji Aonuma, he's always alongside Hidemaro Fujibayashi, almost like a father-son pairing. And equally, when you interview anyone on Mario, Takashi Tezuka is always in the corner, almost like a mentor program.

A lot of these guys are in their 60s and 70s, so there's definitely a changing of the guard at Nintendo and I don't know what that's going to mean. I'm excited to find out, to be honest, because it is good to see that the creative culture of the company is being passed down.

And this is important because the employee retention rate at Nintendo is 98.8%!

I find that absolutely fascinating. It's partly Japanese corporate culture, but I also think, if you want to know why Nintendo makes such good games, that's why. Because the institutional knowledge stays with them for all this time. And the question of how they managed to create that culture is really interesting because inside Nintendo, getting people to talk about that is really hard — I've done a lot of digging, but it's still a mystery to me.

When you go to Nintendo HQ, you're allowed in the lobby and that's it. I remember when I went, I asked "Can I just see upstairs?" and they were like, "Nope."

I have thankfully had great experiences interviewing most of the people who've made games that I love

We ended up doing our photo shoot with Miyamoto in the lobby. They offered us the chance to do it in front of the sign outside, but it looked terrible. It was quite something to watch.

I'd met him once before in 2012 but I had the flu and I was really ill. It was at the Wii U launch and I did a 15-minute interview but I barely remember it because I was so unwell. So this was the first time I'd met him and not been hallucinating, and it was really strange to see him posing with a little Mario toy for a photographer in the Nintendo lobby. He seemed to really enjoy it!

And what was that experience like — meeting him when you were fit and healthy?

They always say "Don't meet your heroes," but I have thankfully had great experiences interviewing most of the people who've made games that I love — partly because a lot of them are Nintendo games.

But it was really interesting meeting Miyamoto because he doesn't love the limelight at all. I had an hour with him, but when we were talking, he took a little while to warm up. He got really excited when we started talking about really nerdy details, like the placement of the D-pad on the GameCube controller and stuff like that. That's when he was like, 'Oh yeah, I remember...' and started talking about the details.

The thing that makes him a great game designer is that he cares a lot about the detail. He cares very, very much about the precise, nitty-gritty details of controllers and consoles. But he's also got a great ability to pick a vision. He'll be like, "This is what's fun about this game and everything else serves that". So he's got the very rare ability to see both the big picture and the details at the same time and figure out how those two things interact with each other. That's why games are so interesting, isn't it? They're technical and artistic. So it's quite rare to see someone who's got both of those brains.

We'll finish with just a little more Zelda chat. There have been rumours of almost every Zelda game getting a remaster by this point. What would be the one that you would want to see return?

Do you know what's really upsetting? The time between now and the Wii U remake of Wind Waker, is longer than it was between the first game and the remaster, which is just upsetting information. But I actually think Wind Waker on the Wii U was perfect for that game.

I think Majora's Mask is the one because, as much as I loved it on the 3DS, you could do so much with that game if you actually remade it — even to the standard of Twilight Princess' visuals. But I also wonder whether part of the eeriness and weirdness of Majora's Mask comes from the polygonal angular look that Nintendo had to do and the reused assets from Ocarina of Time.

I don't know whether I'd like to see the Happy Mask salesman looking like a real person.

Yeah, I'm sort of divided on that, actually. So maybe I'd go for Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Those were fascinating games and, again, so ahead of their time in terms of how they were directed. I would totally play those in a Link's Awakening remaster style. I was delighted to see Link's Awakening looking so cute!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Our thanks to Keza for taking the time to talk to us. 'Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun' is currently expected to be released in Spring 2026.