Shigeru Miyamoto wants Miis on personal IDs ~ Amazing News 2020

Shigeru Miyamoto wants Miis on personal IDs

By Sickr on July 24, 2026

The legendary video game producer Shigeru Miyamoto has talked about his personal dream of personal IDs featuring Mii characters. Personal ID is not mandatory in Japan with Google saying that carrying physical identification like a Residence Card or passport at all times is only strictly mandatory for foreign residents and tourists, but not for nationals. But Miyamoto dreams of this being expanded worldwide with the use of Mii’s which use very little memory due to their basic designs.

“… what’s interesting is that westerners really put a lot of effort into creating their Miis. In the past, it was said that Miis weren’t necessarily designed to suit the faces of westerners, so I’m happy about this. I think it would be really interesting if this wasn’t limited to Pikmin Bloom, but could be linked with Nintendo Accounts and we could collect hundreds of millions of Miis.

Miis use very little memory. Nintendo is a company that is very particular about how to achieve the maximum effect with as little memory as possible. Normally, an avatar can easily take up several megabytes, but Miis are made up of only a few hundred bytes. This compact design started with the specification of wanting to fit dozens of people into a Wii controller, and with this, even if we had hundreds of millions of them, they would probably all fit into that small amount of memory.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if, in the future, Mii characters were attached to personal IDs all over the world? I can’t help but wonder if that’ll ever happen. I’ve been talking about something that sounds like a trade secret, but this is the kind of thing that should be spread around (laughs). Thinking about things like that makes every day fun.”