Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the core concept for the wildly successful Nintendo DS game Nintendogs simply because he bought a Shetland Sheepdog puppy in real life and became weirdly obsessed with training it.

A closer look

Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the core concept for the wildly successful Nintendo DS game Nintendogs simply because he bought a Shetland Sheepdog puppy in real life and became weirdly obsessed with training it. He bored his coworkers at Nintendo by constantly talking about his new pet's behavioral quirks and daily routines, eventually forcing his entire team to channel his mid-life dog obsession into a virtual pet simulation. The resulting title ended up selling nearly twenty-four million copies worldwide, proving that absolute creative authority means you can force a multi-national technology company to validate your personal hobbies. Millions of children spent hours aggressively screaming the name 'Sparky' into the terrible built-in microphone of a portable console, all because one legendary game designer really loved his new dog