TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Donkey Kong, Maro, and Zelda, plans on stepping down from his current position:

“Inside our office, I’ve been recently declaring, ‘I’m going to retire, I’m going to retire,’” Miyamoto said through his interpreter. “I’m not saying that I’m going to retire from game development altogether. What I mean by retiring is, retiring from my current position.”

“What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself,” Miyamoto said. “Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small.”

His games were a huge part of my childhood. I played Mario on NES when I was three, and loved every Nintendo game system through the N64. Mario, Mario Kart, Star Fox, Goldeneye, Super Smash Bros—if I wasn’t outside screwing around, I was probably playing a Nintendo game system. And many of them were ones Miyamoto was directly involved with.

This feels like an end of an era.

It’s fitting, too, that this comes at a time when Nintendo’s facing a rapidly changing landscape for their games. For two decades, really, you had only one choice for casual gaming: a gaming console. You could choose among different kinds of consoles (and handheld systems, largely from the same makers), but the picture was the same: you bought a console and bought relatively expensive games to play on it, games that were controlled by the console maker.

That’s changing. iOS has become a really good gaming platform, even if it’s for quite different—even more casual—kinds of games, and with Airplay Mirroring, it’s only becoming better. People now have a choice: if they only want to play games every once in a while, while they have some free time, it might make more sense just to buy a few iOS games for the device they already own anyway, rather than purchase a console that requires $50 games to be of any value.

It’s a lot harder to compete with that, and it’s certainly possible that the console market will slow, or even decline in size, at some point in the future. That puts Nintendo in a difficult position, because you never want to be dependent on a declining market, but they are very much defined by the console market. Very much like Apple, Nintendo makes the whole package—the console, the games, the controllers. They control the experience, and that’s a part of who they are. Merely making games—albeit great games—for someone else’s platform would deeply change Nintendo’s nature.

But sticking to the console market and refusing to change could end up being like tethering themselves to a sinking ship. Should they begin developing games for different platforms? Should they develop their own post-PC devices? Or should they stay with consoles and their own mobile gaming devices, bet their company on it, and try to make it so good it stays relevant for another decade?

I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any particularly easy choices, let alone good ones.

This is, though, an excellent example of what disruption looks like. Five years ago, mobile phones had very little relation to the gaming market. Phones were for making calls, and devices like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP were for playing games while away from home. Mobile phones had too small of screens, too weak of processors, too poor of controls, and no real SDK for writing worthwhile games. And yet here we are, where mobile phones are taking over mobile gaming.