In the comic book industry you have Stan lee. Stanley Lieber, as his parents would have recognized him, created either alone or with Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the comic book Thor, and the X-Men. No one person in the industry has had his hands and creativity on so many different beloved characters in the entire medium.
This type of status rarely happens. The case could be made for George Lucas and his Star Wars universe, but while he presides over that universe as a god, Star Wars doesn't make up nearly half of the film industry, like Stan the man's comic creations.
While both Stan Lee and George Lucas have been called innovative for their different techniques--Stan with his complex humanity seen in those characters and George with his special effects developments--both didn't really come along early enough in the history of their respective media to really get to define the vocabulary to which each media would eventually conform.
I'm talking about the ability to be technically advanced with each step forward, character creation-driven, and able to define the vocabulary of the following eras...like Stan Lee, George Lucas, and Gutenberg rolled into one. Does this person exist?
Well, yeah. It's a guy and he's Japanese.
While you may not have heard of him, I'd be willing to guarantee if you're reading this entry online somewhere, you'd heard of at least one of his creations.
I'm talking about the legend Shigeru Miyamoto.
He's responsible for the Nintendo characters Donkey Kong, Mario and Luigi, and Link and Zelda.
Shigeru the man is from Kyoto and had a job with Nintendo painting the sides of their arcade game cabinets. Nintendo had a game that wasn't doing so well, and let this young artist try to come up with a game. Shigeru had an idea based on Popeye, with Bluto and Popeye and Olive Oil, but changed it to the antagonist to an Ape and the names to Pauline, after somebody's wife, and Mario, after the landlord of their warehouse workshop.
The premise was that the Ape was Mario's pet, but he escaped and kidnapped the girl, and it was up to Mario to rescue her. I only mention this silly premise because Shigeru couldn't program that well, and used it as an explanation for his desires from his prom programming team. That, and it was the first time a story or premise was used around which to build a video game. They named it Donkey Kong.
After it's success, he gave Mario a brother, named him Luigi, and created another rudimentary jumping type game called "Mario Bros". This was marginally successful. His next game was a industry changer: the iconic "Super Mario Bros". This side scrolling adventure game focused more on gameplay than score accumulation , and came to define a style of game called "platformer" for, pretty much, all-time.
Miyamoto's next game was the next thunderous medium shifter "The Legend of Zelda". Unshackled by time constraints with a world you needed to explore and puzzles that needed to be solved, a new type of video game genre was created. Still difficult and popular today, the 1987 "Legend of Zelda" ranks on many lists as one of the best games ever.
One of his last games for the first generation of Nintendo, Miyamoto dropped probably the pinnacle of the 8-bit cartridge based video game: "Super Mario Bros. 3". Seen in America at the end of the movie The Wizard months before it was released brought the excitement and anticipation to a fever pitch. It was closer to the next installment--on an entirely different game system--than it was to it's predecessors.
Shigeru then launched "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" for the Super Nintendo, which is generally considered one of the best games for that machine, and one of the two or three best Zelda games ever. (One of the other pinnacle games for the Super Nintendo was "Donkey Kong Country", although Miyamoto didn't work on it.)
Next he moved on to Nintendo 64 and developed the world's first truly 3D game with "Mario 64". The medium lurched forward. His next big game for the N64 has gone down as generally considered the Greatest Game Ever, "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time". (Also, it's the only game on this extensive list I've ever beaten.)
Then he was pretty much promoted to the head of development for the company, where he spearheaded the Wii Sports games for the Wii console before getting back into the thick of things with "Mario Galaxy", the Wii's Mario installment. It was considered the bets game for the Wii console ever, until "Mario Galaxy 2" came along. I have Galaxy 2, and let me just say that that shit is difficult as hell.
The media is so new relatively to other media that it makes sense that one person could have such a profound effect upon how we understand and discuss the thing itself.
It still blows me away, though. One guy.
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