Masahiro Sakurai: From Kirby to Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Transcript
Masahiro Sakurai has said that he believes that specialists create the world. By becoming experts in their fields, those who have chosen a certain path will continue to enrich the lives of many other people, including experts in other fields. This ideology drives Sakurai in his creative process, and led him to arguably change the world of gaming. This is how a kid saving his allowance to pay for video games became the man who created one of gaming’s most iconic mascots, and one of the industry’s biggest franchises. This is Masahiro Sakurai.

Masahiro Sakurai was born on August 3, 1970 in Musashimurayama, Tokyo. Very little is known about Sakurai’s family as he rarely talks about them publicly. He has mentioned that his parents didn’t support his pursuit of game design at first, but he later found their home full of merchandise from his games after they found success. Sakurai was first introduced to video games around the age of four or five when he played games like Breakout and Pong in arcades. He was fascinated by the idea of pressing buttons and seeing action on screen.

After this, Sakurai would use allowance to buy video games to further what he called his “research”. And in middle school, Sakurai would get a Famicom basic and begin programming his own games. In his later teenage years, Sakurai would develop an internal struggle that forced him to reflect on what he wanted to do and how he wanted to achieve it. He briefly attended a technical school to learn about electrical engineering before deciding that he actually wanted to work on video games. He dropped out of the technical school in favor of a traditional high school where he would study for exams and work a part time job to afford more games for his personal research. He later concluded that the best way to work with video games was just to do it.

In November of 1986, the developer HAL Laboratory released Gall Force, a game that would set Masahiro Sakurai on the path towards his life’s work. Sakurai played the game and decided that he wanted to work for the company responsible for it after seeing the credits. Just three years later, he would be working for HAL. Early in his employment, one of HAL’s head developers named Satoru Iwata decided that they should make a game that would be fun for both beginners and seasoned gamers. Iwata let anyone in the company pitch him ideas, including Sakurai, who approached Iwata with an idea called Twinkle Popo.

Iwata liked the pitch and the game would eventually become Kirby’s Dream Land. This would be both the first game Sakurai was credited for and his debut as a director. Kirby’s Dream Land was designed to appeal to hardcore and casual players, being simple to complete but difficult to master. Kirby’s ability to fly across the stage was an option for players who might have struggled with the game’s obstacles, meaning that anyone could clear the game regardless of their skill. Sakurai explained his reasoning for this, saying:

“Being able to take multiple hits from enemies, yet dying immediately upon falling into a hole didn’t mix well in my mind, so I blew [Kirby] up like a balloon so that he could fly at any time."

Originally, Kirby was called Popopo and his design was simple and round. This was always intended to be nothing more than a placeholder. However, late in development, Sakurai and Iwata decided that having a character that could be easily drawn might have a wide appeal. They decided to finalize Popopo’s simple design and Sakurai chose to color the character pink. His name was later changed to Twinkle Popo and sent off to Nintendo of America for feedback. The Americans sent back a list of other name ideas to use, and amongst them was Kirby. Though it is commonly thought this name was borrowed from John Kirby (the lawyer who helped defend Nintendo against Universal Studios over the name “Donkey Kong”), it is unknown if this is the actual origin of the name. Sakurai and HAL liked the general harshness of the word “Kirby” when contrasted with the character’s soft design, so this name stuck.

Kirby’s Dream Land had a difficult development because it used a modified Twin Famicom System with a trackball to enter code. However, upon its release for the GameBoy, Kirby was an instant success and Sakurai was tasked to work on a sequel to the game. This time, the game would be set for the Famicom and the Nintendo Entertainment System, and was intended to be one of the last first party games for the console. One of the biggest pieces of feedback from critics and fans was that Kirby’s Dream Land was too easy and too short. In response to this (and also because their new game was to be one of the final NES games), Sakurai decided they could make the game more difficult. However, to keep it accessible and give the player more options, Sakurai added the copy system to the game, allowing for Kirby to copy his opponents’ abilities and use them. This, in turn, gave the player more variety in how they wanted to overcome the game’s platforming and defeat enemies. Sakurai would later call this style of game design “Kirbyism”. Essentially, Sakurai seeks to keep his games wide in terms of accessibility, but deep in terms of offering challenge and replayability. He always seeks to give players value in making his games, a philosophy that would drive most of his future titles. The next project that Sakurai would direct would be another Kirby game for the Super Nintendo called Kirby Super Star. For this title, Sakurai decided he wanted to use the increased production value offered by the Super Nintendo and packed in several different types of games into Super Star. Shigeru Miyamoto also tasked Sakurai with making a sidescrolling action game playable by two people at the same time, which led to the creation of the Helper system. This would become a staple in the Kirby series since its introduction in Super Star. Around this time, Sakurai’s personal life also began to change. A woman named Michiko Takahashi joined HAL and worked on Kirby’s Star Stacker. She later joined Sakurai in the development of his next project, where she created several levels and designed the menu system. At some point, Sakurai and Takahashi began dating and would go on to be married in June of 2008. For his next project, Sakurai was told to work on something new and different from Kirby. For this new game, Sakurai would create two prototypes: one for an action-adventure game, and a second for a fighting game simply called “Ryuoh: The Fighting Game”. Ryuoh was originally developed by just Sakurai himself and Satoru Iwata, who had since become president of HAL. The game was different from traditional fighters in that players did not try to get their opponents’ health to zero. Instead, as a character was hit, they accumulated damage, which made it easier for them to get knocked off of the stage. Sakurai decided to include several ideas that he’d introduced with Kirby, most notably the idea of blast zones at the edge of stages. Iwata and Sakurai also concluded that they needed a roster of characters that players would easily connect with, and decided to make a prototype featuring some of Nintendo’s most popular characters. When the prototype was first shown to Shigeru Miyamoto, he rejected it. But Iwata hid this from Sakurai and the two continued to work on the game. When the pair later presented a more complete vision for the game, Miyamoto finally approved of it, and Super Smash Bros was born. Despite the rough start of development, Sakurai always felt like the game could be a success. He said: “We were confident that it was an idea that a lot of people would endorse, and most importantly, we were confident that there was a large audience that was waiting for this kind of game.”

With a roster including some of Nintendo’s most iconic characters and a simple battle mechanic, Smash Bros would prove to be an instant hit. After the game’s launch, Sakurai started posting on a blog he called the Smash Dojo, which gave players hints and tips about the new fighting game. Sakurai also used the platform to answer various fan questions and even gave players tips on how to complete GoldenEye 007.

Just three months after the release of Super Smash Bros in the US in April of 1999, Sakurai would complete his initial draft of its sequel on Nintendo’s next console and begin prototyping. As Sakurai later said:

“...the previous game did well enough that Nintendo [...] knew what I wanted in advance and I wanted a lot.”

Sakurai wanted everything about this game to be bigger and better than its predecessor, even down to its music. This was the first game in the series to see an orchestrated score, which Sakurai personally pushed for. He felt so strongly about this that he was willing to use his own money to fund it if Nintendo were unwilling to. In May of 2001, Super Smash Bros. Melee was officially shown to the public at E3, and its first tournament would be held later that same year at Spaceworld 2001.

Melee’s development was particularly difficult on Sakurai. He noted that he only took a few days off over its thirteen-month development cycle, and was even hospitalized at one point. This effort was not in vain, though, as Melee would break both critical and commercial expectations, and has remained a staple in the fighting game community since its release. Around the same time, a Kirby animated series called Kirby: Right Back At Ya was airing, produced by Warp Star Incorporated (a joint project between HAL and Nintendo). Sakurai was heavily involved with the animation’s production, often giving feedback on ideas and sketches for the show. Famously, Sakurai restricted the animators with Kirby’s inability to speak, which posed many challenges for the team. On the game design side, Sakurai had also moved on and begun development of Kirby Air Ride (a project that had its roots on the Nintendo 64, though Sakurai has stated that the N64 and GameCube iterations of Air Ride were different and only had a name in common). During this period, Sakurai began to grow tired of his current role and work as a game designer, and by the end of development on Kirby Air Ride, he decided to leave HAL and become a free agent. Kirby: Right Back At Ya ended in September of 2003, just a month after Sakurai’s departure from HAL. In his Famitsu column, Sakurai explained his decision: “I felt that in the current organization that it would be difficult to continue making games. [I left] because I felt there would be appeal in working with a variety of other content creators.”

Sakurai grew tired of trying to climb the corporate ladder, and just wanted to focus on making games for his customers instead of for a company or corporation. Additionally, in an interview posted on Project Sora, Sakurai stated that he felt limited working with the same people over and over and wanted to work with different people on new projects. Still, before leaving HAL, Sakurai consulted with Satoru Iwata (his friend and mentor who had since become the president of Nintendo). Iwata gave Sakurai his blessing, and told Sakurai that if Nintendo were to ever make another Smash game, he may contact Sakurai to consult him.

After leaving HAL, Sakurai was brought on to help with one final Kirby game: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, developed by Capcom subsidiary Flagship. The title was built on the same technology as Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, a game that Sakurai co-directed with Shinichi Shimamura. Sakurai is credited as a special advisor on The Amazing Mirror, and it would be the final time he’d work directly on a game starring his pink creation.

Now a freelancer, Sakurai began to focus working on a variety of different projects. He continued to publish a biweekly column in Famitsu Magazine titled “Think About the Video Games”, where he expressed his thoughts on topics relating to the industry. In 2004, Sakurai gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference called “Risk and Return”, where he talked about how games need both risk and reward to entertain players.

In 2005, Sakurai created a puzzle game called Meteos with Tatsuya Mizuki for the Nintendo DS. In that same year, he began designing Sadat a Mushi King, Tamagotchi-like games for Sega’s Mushi King series. Though he enjoyed working on these various titles and several other developers approached Sakurai with proposals, one game caught Sakurai’s interest more than any other.

At an E3 pre-party in 2005, Sakurai was shocked to learn that Iwata had plans for another Smash Bros game on the yet-to-be-released Nintendo Wii. Shortly afterwards, Iwata and Sakurai met in a hotel room where Iwata asked Sakurai to come back and help with the new title. Sakurai agreed, explaining:

“If I left someone else in charge, the customers and the people who originally worked on Smash might be disappointed. If that happened, I would be deeply hurt. I couldn’t ignore these demands as the original author!!”

He formed a new independent company called Sora Limited, which helped to facilitate contracts, payments, and copyrights. However, since Sakurai was not outright employed by Nintendo or any other company, his position is unique in the industry. It also means that whenever Sakurai is brought back to work on a new Smash Bros game, Nintendo must go through a lengthy legal process just to allow him to work on it.

With Miyamoto’s advice, Nintendo and Sakurai recruited personnel from the developer called Game Arts, who had impressed Sakurai with their dedication to playing Melee in their work on Grandia 3. A new office was founded in Tokyo so that Sakurai could work on the game instead of in Kyoto at Nintendo’s main headquarters. Though HAL was not directly involved with the development of this new Smash Bros, they did offer Sakurai and his new team the same studio space and programs that they’d used to develop Melee. Sakurai was grateful for this gesture as it made development much more efficient.

For this new Smash Bros game, Sakurai wanted to add an ambitious single-player campaign. The story was to be so big that Sakurai envisioned the game being developed by two different studios, though these plans fell through when he couldn’t find the company he could trust to handle it. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was announced at E3 2006, and shocked fans by including third-party characters like Konami’s Solid Snake and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog. When Brawl was released in early 2008, it was a bigger hit than even Melee and has since sold 13.27 million copies.

In February of 2009, after completing development on Brawl, Sakurai and some of his peers founded Project Sora, an ad-hoc development studio in Tokyo. The original intent of Project Sora was to gather a team of developers, create a new portable game for Nintendo’s next-generation handheld, and then eventually work on a new Super Smash Bros game. Under Sakurai’s direction, Project Sora would go on to develop Kid Icarus: Uprising using redesigns of the Kid Icarus characters from Brawl. However, after completing Uprising, the team was disbanded and Project Sora dissolved.

Sakurai later explained in an interview that it was difficult on a human resources level to maintain the company because it had recruited so many people from different studios. Though Project Sora was disbanded, the idea of making another Smash Bros game remained. Sakurai and Iwata decided that they should make two versions of the new game: one for the Wii U, and one for the 3DS. This was announced at Nintendo’s E3 presentation in 2011, but development did not begin until after Sakurai completed Kid Icarus: Uprising in March of the following year.

For the new games, Nintendo teamed up with Bandai Namco, who had staff members who had experience in fighting game franchises like Tekken and Soul Calibur. The cast for the new game was greatly expanded and included more iconic third-party newcomers like Capcom’s Mega Man and Bandai Namco’s Pac-Man. Sakurai also let other staff members help him with balancing the game, hopefully lessening the stress on him during development. Despite this, Sakurai suffered from calcific tendinitis in his right shoulder during production, which caused him great discomfort and pain. Regardless, he soldiered on, making adjustments to his toolset such as using a trackball mouse instead of a normal mouse to ease the pain.

Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS were released in September of 2014 to great success, selling more than 8.5 million copies combined. Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS were also the first games in the franchise to feature downloadable content, which opened the door for more surprise newcomers like Square Enix’s Cloud from Final Fantasy VII and Platinum Games’s Bayonetta.

However, during this period, tragedy would strike at Nintendo. On July 11, 2015, Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata passed away from complications of a tumor in his bile duct. The loss of his friend and mentor devastated Sakurai, who later said in his column:

“...I wrote about my point of view, that when a person dies, that’s simply a single character disappearing, but to that person, their entire world disappears. [...] However, even for others, Mr. Iwata had a presence that was too great to simply call him a character in their story, I think.”

After the completion of the development of DLC for Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS, Sakurai announced that he was taking a short break, but that his next project had already been decided. Years later, this project was revealed to be Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch, a game that Sakurai truly wanted to live up to its name. He decided that this game should be the ultimate Smash Bros experience, and that every veteran fighter should return alongside several highly-requested newcomers and the most popular items and stages from previous games. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was released on December 7, 2018.

Sakurai once said that developers should see things from the player’s perspective. Don’t limit the possibilities of gameplay. This philosophy, alongside his desire to exceed his own expectations, has undoubtedly made Sakurai a specialist in game development. Whether it’s crafting new and fun ideas through titles like Kirby, Smash Bros, or Meteos, or pushing the limits with his own sequels or reboots, Sakurai has always sought to deliver as much value as possible to the highest number of players. And for that, he has indeed changed the world of gaming.