Upon a friend's recommendation, Miyazaki began playing the 2001 video game Ico, causing him to consider a career change to a game designer. Career Īfter graduating from Keio University with a degree in social science, Miyazaki went to work doing account managing for the US based Oracle Corporation. Alongside this, he was restricted from playing video games by his parents until he was old enough to attend university, so he instead played gamebooks and tabletop games such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and Dungeons & Dragons.

Using his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, Miyazaki used this as inspiration for some of his later ideas on video game design. The books he read at the time were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts he could not fully understand. Despite that, he was a heavy reader, but as his parents could not afford to buy him books or manga, he had to borrow from his local library. Miyazaki grew up 'tremendously poor' while living in the city of Shizuoka, Japan around 1975, stating that he had no life ambitions as a child.