The world of video games has several big-name personalities within it. Think about it–at first, gaming was just for those who had the right amount of quarters, and then for kids who had parents willing to buy them the consoles, and so on. Now though, gaming is a full-on society of people, especially because of services like Twitch where people can stream to just about anywhere. Even within the game development community, there are “superstars” that people love to see on stage or talking about video games. Easily, one of the biggest ones is Masahiro Sakurai.
Masahiro Sakurai is the brainchild and designer behind many things, including helping make Super Smash Bros what it is today, developing the Kirby games, and more. Because of his decades of experience, Sakurai felt it would finally be a good time to share some of his wisdom with the world by making his own YouTube channel on making games. He noted himself in the first video of which that he wasn’t expecting a lot of people to watch it, but in fact, a Llot of people have subscribed to his channel, which was proven by this YouTube award that he was given.
Now, to be fair, that’s a bit of a misnomer, because as of this writing, Sakura has actually got about 450k subscribers on the US side! Plus, there’s the Japanese-only side of the channel which has the same thing but no subtitles, and that channel is doing quite well. In fact, if you combine the two channels, he’s nearing about 800k.
This is a massive achievement for him because you could tell he wondered just how much people would listen to him in this format. The answer is, as many fans speculated, quite a few.
The best part is that per his promise he’s not going super in-depth into his “understandings” of the video game work. Instead, he’s making bite-sized videos with plenty of visuals to help future game developers understand that there is a lot going on in the world of making video games and that you have to go and make every aspect of the game great in some way in order to ensure that you are content with what you made and that gamers can have fun.
A great example of this came from his breakdown of the second Kirby title. It was here that the Copy Ability for Kirby was made. He did that to add some more design to the title, and obviously, it stuck, but he noted that you could complete the game without using it, thus making it easier for newcomers to play.
Check out his channel to see all the advice he gives. It’s worth it.
Source: Twitter
