Masahiro Sakurai is known within the gaming industry for making games that are easy to pick up. However, he actually considers himself a hardcore gamer.
He recently sat down for an interview with Gen Hoshino. During this interview, Sakurai took the time to explain what inspired him to make games with low learning curves despite his own experiences.
“The first game you directed was the Game Boy game Kirby’s Adventure. Kirby was a game that caught on with lots of people who had never touched games before so it had a very wide audience. But Sakurai-san, you yourself are a core gamer, yes?” asked Hoshino.
“But I started considering, what would I need for someone like that to start enjoying games?” — Masahiro Sakurai
“That’s right, I’m pretty hardcore with games,” responded Sakurai.
Of course, this answer was expected from Sakurai as he has talked about this before. As a designer, Sakurai doesn’t necessarily design games based on his own interests and skills. This prompted Hoshino to get to what he really wanted to ask of Sakurai.
“So why did you make a game like Kirby which was aimed at beginners?” continued Hoshino.
“For example, I thought it’d be impossible to get my mother to play a video game,” begun Sakurai. “But I started considering, what would I need for someone like that to start enjoying games?”
“Even if Kirby were made specifically with beginners in mind, as long as it had those important elements, then we wouldn’t end up with a scenario where high level players didn’t play it at all.” — Masahiro Sakurai
“I talked about it during my ‘design concepts’ videos, but the Game Boy in particular was a system where we tried to figure out how to get people engrossed in the game world.”
Sakurai was also considering the Game Boy in which he was designing for. Since levels couldn’t be too long due to battery life limitations, many developers resorted to making games difficult for the sake of extending game time. However, Sakurai had his doubts about this approach.
“At the time, RPGs and Action RPGs had a relatively high popularity, and tended to have quite high difficulty to allow for longer game time, and also because of low battery time often consisted of fairly short stages that you could die on many times before clearing them,” continued Sakurai. “But I thought, why is that?”
“You were doubtful about this trend?” inquired Hoshino in response.
“I started thinking that as long as it feels good and you can play it over and over again, isn’t that a good way to approach it?” — Masahiro Sakurai
Even though Sakurai was designing explicitly for beginners, he didn’t think that this would dissuade more experienced gamers from playing if the game still had a fun experience attached to it.
“For example, even for arcade games where you could reach the ending within 20 minutes, if they were fun enough you’d keep playing them over and over again,” declared Sakurai. “So having controls that felt good, music that you liked to hear, things like this were good to focus on, I thought.”
“Even if Kirby were made specifically with beginners in mind, as long as it had those important elements, then we wouldn’t end up with a scenario where high level players didn’t play it at all.”
“I started thinking that as long as it feels good and you can play it over and over again, isn’t that a good way to approach it?”
Overall, this is how the Super Smash Bros. series designed. Although the controls are simple in nature, there’s still plenty of depth for experienced gamers to explore for years and years.
This design philosophy will likely carry over into future games designed by Masahiro Sakurai, despite how far the Super Smash Bros. franchise has come with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as the latest entry in the series.
Notably, Nintendo recently unveiled a sneak peek at the Switch 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 focused Direct is scheduled to take place on April 2, 2025.
It turns out that Sakurai has been working on a secret game project since April 2022, which has seemingly been ongoing even during this interview. We’ll just have to see just how beginner friendly the game is when it likely gets revealed during that Switch 2 Direct.
A special thanks goes out to Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor for the translations featured in this article.
Source: Event Hubs
