Masahiro Sakurai has had quite a career in video game development that has spanned for over 30 years at this point. Needless to say, he has quite a bit of wisdom to pass along when it comes to game design, which explains why he created his YouTube channel in the first place.
Recently, Sakurai teamed up with Hideki Kamiya, creator of the Bayonetta series, while making a guest appearance during the Arcade Archive’s 10-year anniversary event. Sakurai had some interesting things to say. These statements have been translated by Automaton.
As a gamer himself, Sakurai apparently doesn’t like the idea of wasting players’ time. If Sakurai can save even just a single second, he’s willing to devote quite a bit of mental energy towards doing this.
“When you’re at the arcade, you swiftly jump from one machine to another, switching between various games,” said Sakurai. “But why is it that you don’t get the same impulse with Archive Arcade games despite there being many games to choose from?”
“Rather than just tossing in a coin and getting into the game immediately, you must click an icon, wait for the logo, wait for the title, look at the instructions screen, wait until everything loads, and then you’re finally at the main screen, after which you can start playing,” continued Sakurai. “I want you to measure the total time this takes and shorten it by even one second.”
One way to easily do this is by simply allowing the player to mash a button to skip. However, Sakurai would go on to cite a situation in which this solution wasn’t viable.
When developing Kirby Air Ride, Sakurai made the decision to cut Dolby Surround audio support since using this technology meant that the game would have to display the Dolby logo for over one second. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but the idea clearly bothered Sakurai.
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” stated Sakurai. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose.”
Effectively, Sakurai valued that one second of time for players over Dolby Surround audio. It seems that Sakurai has retained this sort of mindset even to this day.
Ultimately, Kirby Air Ride would be the last game Masahiro Sakurai would direct while employed under Hal Laboratory. He ended up leaving the company afterwards since he was tired of the pressures of the industry that came with developing a sequel immediately after a new game was released.
However, Sakurai’s expertise and insight when it came to game development was valued by Nintendo, which is why Satoru Iwata, the then President of Nintendo, would go out of his way to contract Sakurai to act as Director of the Super Smash Bros series for Brawl and beyond.
