Shigeru Miyamoto isn't just a one hit wonder or someone that created a single iconic character, he's been a dominant force in the gaming industry for over three decades, so when the man says something about games, it's worth taking a listen.
Clearly some of the characters he's created and many of the others that Nintendo has first party developed/published, have had a profound effect on Miyamoto, as he believes Nintendo should be its own gaming genre:
"Nintendo isn’t one simple element of an overall gaming industry. I really think there needs to be a Nintendo genre, that’s almost its own entity," he said in a chat with the LA Times.
He might have a point too, especially in the modern age of gaming. While traditionally games were silly affairs, with gorillas throwing barrels and yellow pucks eating dots, today games are about realism or at least an interpretation of that, with high-end visuals, accurate gender depictions and representations and physics engines that are as earth-like as possible, but in Nintendo games, you're still a plumber in a cat outfit. In Mario Kart you're a baby dinosaur hurling green turtle shells from the back of your anti-gravity go-kart. It's silly and much more traditional. Nintendo's developments hail from a time where fun mattered most.
That's why it caught so much crap over not allowing same-sex marriage in Tomodachi life. That's almost an impossible idea for Nintendo to understand, it doesn't make games about real relationships.
At least that seems to be what Miyamoto is saying. Do you guys agree? Is Nintendo something different than other developers?