Kirby And Smash Bros Creator Is Suffering From Repetitive Strain Injury

Repetitive strain injuries, or RSIs as they're commonly known, is becoming a major concern for our generation. Many of us spend the vast majority of our time at the computer, manipulating the keyboard and mouse for hours on end. As a result, many people are suffering health related problems.

And one of them, as Polygon reports, is Masahiro Sakurai, creator of the Kirby and Smash Bros franchise. He states in his latest column for Famitsu that his RSI is getting so bad that it's at "the point where it's starting to restrict my work and lifestyle."

Furthermore:

"Using a mouse, keyboard or gamepad make my arm tired, so I can't use them in a continual manner… The only device I can use for an extended period of time is a joystick. It's posing problems when I'm test-playing something in progress."

RSIs is a major issue for millions of people, and Sakurai is just one of them. One of the main problems is how one simply cannot stop doing the things that leads to such issues, since they're usually work related activities:

"I figure that if I cut down on writing emails and other things, try not to type in so much data myself, and start giving more verbal directions, that'll reduce the amount of keyboard-oriented work I have to do… But if I'm going to be supervising other people's work, there's no way to cut down the amount of mouse usage I need to perform. I'm trying to work it with my left hand in order to give the right one some rest, but that definitely cuts down on my work efficiency."

That work he speaks of, by the way, is Smash Bros for both the Wii and the 3DS.

Though Sakurai does have a solution: trackballs. And thankfully, he has a good supply of them; he used to work for HAL Laboratory, which made the input devices. They even rigged it in a special way, just for him:

"Kirby was drawn with a trackball on the Game Boy and NES… The internal hardware team at HAL came up with a way to connect a trackball to the NES, then use a dev tool that ran on a Twin Famicom disc to draw graphics. It was great because you could draw and animate graphics right on the NES screen with the trackball, clicking on numbers onscreen to go between animation frames. It really had a beneficial effect on HAL's NES and Game Boy development — in some ways I think we really had a powerhouse system."