Shigeru Miyamoto
Miyamoto became Nintendo's first artist. He helped create the art for Nintendo's first original coin-operated arcade video game, Sheriff. He first helped the company develop a game with the 1980 release Radar Scope. The game had some success in Japan. However, by 1981, Nintendo's efforts to sell it in the North American video game market failed. This left the company with a lot of arcade machines that were not sold. Nintendo was also facing financial ruin. In order to try to keep Nintendo going, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi decided to change unsold Radar Scope machines into a new arcade game. He asked Miyamoto to do this. Miyamoto said self-deprecatingly that "no one else was available" to do the work. Nintendo's head engineer, Gunpei Yokoi, oversaw the project.