When Masahiro Sakurai was a young man, he played a lot of arcade games.
He was a superstar.
He had a fifty-strong win streak on Street Fighter 2.
Nobody could beat him.
One day, Masahiro was playing a new game, King of Fighters ’95.
The cabinet was designed so that two players were on opposite sides of the machine, each
with their own screen.
This meant that Masahiro couldn’t see his opponent.
Masahiro was feeling cocky, and faced with an anonymous opponent, he let loose.
He destroyed the rival player, beating them to a pulp in a matter of seconds.
But then, Masahiro’s smug self-satisfaction disappeared.
He glanced around the cabinet to see who he’d been playing against.
They were a complete beginner, clearly at the arcade for the first time with their more
enthusiastic partner.
The pair were just there to have fun, and Masahiro had crushed their enthusiasm.
Masahiro felt awful.
In his eagerness to prove himself a champion, he’d steamrolled over someone who didn’t
deserve such treatment.
He might well have ruined their experience to the point that they might not want to try
playing games again.
Years later, Masahiro would have the opportunity to create his very own series of fighting
games.
These games, he decided, wouldn’t be aimed at just a single audience.
They wouldn’t be for hardcore experts and professionals, and they also wouldn’t be
aimed solely at casual players.
No matter who picked up a controller, and what games they might be familiar with, Masahiro
wanted them to have a good time.
This is the story of Masahiro Sakurai, and the labour of love that created, and refined,
the Super Smash Brothers series.
Masahiro Sakurai devours video games.
This love affair with gaming started when he was a child, but his obsession really began
to take hold when he was at school, studying industrial design with the hopes of becoming
an engineer.
One day, he decided.
He would complete his studies, but he had changed his mind about his career progression.
He wanted to make video games for a living.
This meant that his education needed to take on some additional facets.
If he wanted to make games, he needed to do his research, and learn as much as he could
about how they were put together.
The most logical way to do this was to play games.
For two years, he studied during the day, then worked a part-time job, so that he’d
have enough money to buy as many games as possible.
Mashiro played everything he could get his hands on.
He even went out of his way to play games that he didn’t like, in genres that didn’t
immediately appeal to him.
He wanted to figure out what made a game fun, and, crucially, what got in the way of a game
being fun.
Logically, no developer ever set out to make a game that wasn’t enjoyable, so what design
decisions ended up resulting in a poor finished experience?
Masahiro’s parents were utterly opposed to his preferred life goals.
They didn’t understand this new emerging video game industry.
It hadn’t existed when they were young, and they viewed it with suspicion.
Yet in spite of a lot of family pressure to give up and do something safe instead, Masahiro
kept pushing forward with his dream of working in video games.
Masahiro got a job at HAL Laboratory, a newly formed games studio that lacked a lot of the
prestige of some existing companies.
At just nineteen years of age, Masahiro directed his first game, Kirby’s Dream Land for the
Nintendo Gameboy.
He was tasked with making a simple game that even novices could complete without too much
challenge.
As he set about this task, he created a simple round blob character to serve as a stand-in,
as no specific protagonist had been decided on.
During testing, everyone at HAL fell in love with the adorable round puff ball.
Eventually, Masahiro decided to stop searching for a more complex mascot for his game, and
simply expanded the blob into a more fleshed out character.
The title proved to be a big hit, and everyone, both fans, and those within the company, began
demanding a follow-up.
Most gratifying of all was a trip that Masahiro took to visit his parents.
He noticed that these staunch opponents to his video game career had now filled their
house with every piece of Kirby merchandise that they could lay their hands on.
But Masahiro was less than enamoured with the constant call for endless Kirby sequels.
He didn’t want to be stuck making the same game over and over, and he yearned to flex
his creative muscles and try something new.
Masahiro came up with an idea for a fighting game; something that was fundamentally different
to most titles in this genre.
Instead of a game where only two players fought at a time, Masahiro wanted to make what he
called a “4-player battle royale”.
He even wrote this on the front of his unofficial project plan.
Masahiro was enthusiastic about the game, but unable to do much with the idea as his
schedule was already filled with many other, more financially lucrative game projects for
HAL.
Nevertheless, Masahiro took his idea to his friend and mentor, Satoru Iwata.
Satoru was intrigued, but was also very busy.
Eventually, though, he agreed to help Masahiro with this secret project.
The two began working in their spare time on what they titled Dragon King: The Fighting
Game.
It was, according to Satoru, the ultimate handcrafted project.
Masahiro designed everything about the game, from stage layouts to battle mechanics, while
Satoru tackled the programming side of the game.
Satoru began having a lot of fun.
He was supposed to be the head of another project during the working week, so he spent
his weekends secretly slaving away on Dragon King.
The pair were hardly able to keep their excitement about this game a secret for long.
One HAL employee complained to Satoru that he always seemed to come to life when he was
working on Dragon King, in a way that he didn’t while tackling his actual work for the company.
For a while, as with Kirby, Masahiro let artwork and character design take a back seat.
Early prototypes used photographs Masahiro had taken in the area surrounding his office,
instead of any actual artwork.
But as he worked on the game, Masahiro began to worry that having four characters on the
screen at once would get confusing.
He felt that the game needed distinct, and ideally, familiar characters that would stand
out, helping the player to see what was going on and keep track of their own character.
Feeling bold, Masahiro took his prototype to Nintendo.
He wanted to do the impossible: convince the company to let him use several of their most
famous characters to fill out a roster for a fighting game.
This was unlike anything Nintendo had ever done before, and it felt like a big departure
from the company’s standard brand identity.
But Masahiro liked his chances, and he campaign with vigour.
Nintendo’s higher-ups agreed.
Dragon King was to become Super Smash Brothers.
Some Nintendo fans were apprehensive at first.
The idea of Mario, Link, and Pikachu all punching each other seemed very strange for such a
traditionally family friendly company.
Plus, there was a worry that the game would be just another shallow fighter, without offering
much unique gameplay.
These concerns were soon silenced as gamers fell in love with Smash Brothers.
The game won a large audience, and its follow-up title, Super Smash Brother Melee, was seen
by many as the best game ever released on the Nintendo GameCube.
But Masahiro was feeling trapped yet again.
He’d managed to escape the gilded cage of endless Kirby sequels by making something
new, only to now be stuck as Nintendo’s go-to Smash developer.
Every day, people asked him when the next game in the series would be released, and
Masahiro was sick of it.
So, Masahiro quit.
He had no hard feelings towards Nintendo; he simply needed more creative freedom.
He set up his own games studio, and got to work making the kinds of varied games that
he’d always wanted to make.
Masahiro made precisely two games before getting sucked back into the Smash Brothers orbit.
He made Meteos, a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, followed by Sega’s Mushiking: The King
of Beetles, an arcade game that also featured a collectible trading card game.
Mushiking went on to phenomenal success across East Asia, selling over twenty million trading
cards, and entering the Guinness book of World Records for the largest number of tournaments
ever held for an arcade game.
But, eventually, Nintendo came calling.
They needed him back.
The company was working on a new Super Smash Brothers title, and it just wasn’t the same
without Masahiro.
And so, begrudgingly, Masahiro returned to the fold, directing Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
But, this time he had a plan to avoid getting pigeonholed yet again.
Brawl heavily features a totally redesigned version of Pit, a classic character from the
NES era of Nintendo games.
What initially looks like little more than a reference to Nintendo’s past, actually
became Masahiro’s next game.
Having directed Brawl, he then moved on to Kid Icarus: Uprising.
He’d successfully come up with a wholly new game idea, and snuck it into his beloved
pre-existing series.
From there, Masahiro went on to direct Super Smash Brothers for the Wii U and 3DS, and
Super Smash Brothers Ultimate.
As the clout of the series grew, Masahiro took the opportunity to make these games as
inclusive as possible.
His game collection had grown significantly by this point.
He had begun running out of places to store all of his games, and still, continued to
play everything he could get his hands on.
With so much knowledge about classic games, Masahiro decided to put these into Smash Brothers.
Every reference, every Easter Egg, and every obscure callback to a previous era of gaming,
all came from Masahiro.
He was the one to suggest to his development team that a specific game be mentioned, as
his encyclopedic knowledge of gaming was put to use.
If this sounds like more work than any one person can do comfortably, that’s because
it was.
After working so many long nights, seven days a week, and playing games in every available
second, Masahiro’s body began feeling the pain.
While working on Super Smash Brothers for the Wii U and 3DS, he was diagnosed with tendonitis
in his shoulder, and forced by doctors to rest.
This didn’t sit well with Masahiro.
After all, even taking a break from work was frustrating if his main hobby – playing
games – was the true cause of his injury!
Masahiro doesn’t think he’ll ever retire from video games.
What his parents thought was just a fad, has become the driving force in his entire life.
In his own words: “Even for people who say that they grow
out of games, once they have kids and there’s a game they can play together, they return.
It’s not about quitting or graduating from playing games; it’s about finding what’s
enjoyable for you at that time in your life, and playing that.”
The moral of the story is that you should find something that you are passionate about.
Perhaps you shouldn’t pursue your goals with quite the same level of devotion as Masahiro
Sakurai – if your body starts to wear out, it’s probably worth taking a break.
But Masahiro’s devotion to gaming can be a lesson to us all.
No matter what you care about, no matter what drives you, keep pushing forward.
It doesn’t matter if other people don’t understand.
What matters is that you follow your passion, develop the skills and the knowledge that
you want to have.
Enjoy yourself.
Do what you love, and your life will be far more enjoyable as a result.
You can never, ever, get too old to have fun.