Shigeru Miyamoto has probably never compiled a line of code in his life and is still a better coder than most of you. — INDIEPIXEL BLOG

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Shigeru Miyamoto has probably never compiled a line of code in his life and is still a better coder than most of you.

2026-04-23 · gizmo64k

Let me make the case.

Donkey Kong, 1981. The jump arc, the barrel physics, the way Mario's momentum carries him off a platform if you mistime the jump... those aren't accidents. Those are tuning decisions, made by a person with a specific theory of how a player's body would feel a falling character. Miyamoto sat next to programmers and iterated on numbers until the feel was right. The programmers typed. Miyamoto decided what they were typing toward.

Super Mario Bros, 1985. The decision to put an enemy right after the first pipe so the player learns to jump by dying immediately. The decision to make the first screen teach the entire game's vocabulary without a tutorial. The decision to let Mario's jump height scale with how long you hold the button. These are architectural decisions about how information flows between a machine and a human nervous system. If you think those decisions don't count as coding, you don't know what coding is.

Zelda, 1986. A battery-backed save system at a moment when every other game used passwords, because Miyamoto decided the player's time was worth protecting. An overworld designed to reward exploration instead of punishing it. A dungeon system that teaches you the rules of its geometry in the first room. Architectural calls.

He made these decisions without writing code himself. He made them by understanding the machine, the medium, and the human at a level most of his programmers could not reach. When you play a Miyamoto game and it feels right, that feel is the output of a design process that operated above the opcodes and above the data structures, at the level where the whole system coheres or doesn't.

The industry calls that "design," and files it in a separate drawer from engineering/coding.

Three levels of coding

There are roughly three levels at which coding happens, and most discussion of coding only recognizes one.

Level 1: syntax. Loops, types, recursion, the standard stuff. How you write a correct sentence in the language. This is what bootcamps teach, what LeetCode measures, what junior interviews filter for. Most computer science graduates can do this.

Level 2: flow. What you do with Level 1. Formally correct and good versus formally correct and terrible. Choosing the right data structure. Knowing why the academically beautiful solution takes twenty minutes and the ugly pragmatic one takes three milliseconds. Most computer scientists fall off here. The ones who don't usually do it by instinct without being able to teach it.

Level 3: architecture. Macro decisions. Full awareness of all the consequences of each call before you make it. Why your node system is trigger-pull-based and not event-pushed. Why your data layer returns synchronously even though everyone expects async. Why you chose a flat table over a pretty schema because the retrieval pattern matters more than the shape. Level 3 is where systems either cohere or silently fall apart two years later, and you usually can't tell which it is until it's too late.

The levels are not mutually exclusive. Truly good coders work all three. A decent engineer lives at Level 2 most Tuesdays and gets dragged into Level 3 on Thursdays whether they want to or not. Nobody is pure anything. And Level 3 judgment usually grows out of Level 1 time: the architects whose decisions hold up ten years later are, overwhelmingly, people who spent a decade at the keyboard before they stopped needing to. Miyamoto is a genuine exception, not a template. The point is not that Level 1 is beneath anyone, but that the industry stopped at Level 1 and called the map complete. Likewise most developers operate and discuss Level 1. Some discuss Level 2. Very few can or enjoy discussing Level 3, because most have never had to make Level 3 decisions, they've worked inside architectures other people made, and they've learned to pattern-match on the surface without understanding or caring about the choices underneath. Concepts like OOP, functional programming, procedural design are used more as symbols of belonging and tribalism than anything. Most devs pick their hammer and then treat every problem as a nail.

Miyamoto operates almost entirely at Level 3. He doesn't operate at Level 1, he delegates it, and has for nearly fifty years. And he has produced more technical innovation than most programmers do in an entire career, because Level 3 is where the innovation actually lives and Levels 1 and 2 are where it gets implemented. When the Level 1 and 2 people are willing to implement it, anyway.

But the industry can't measure Level 3. It doesn't even have vocabulary for it that isn't squishy. "Architect," "principal engineer," "senior staff", these are job...