Earlier this year, development for Super Smash Bros Ultimate came to an end. While people could simply use this time to continue playing the game, fans are inevitably wondering what the game’s creator Masahiro Sakurai is planning next. (This, despite the internet continuously telling him to stop working so hard take a vacation for years.) In a recent interview with 4Gamer, Sakurai is giving an answer, but not the one fans were hoping for. The man behind Super Smash Bros and Kid Icarus simply stated that “doing anything else is going to take some time, so it’s probably best to forget about me for a while.”
Some more interesting tidbits came out during this interview–Sakurai’s favorite game this year was the horror deck-building game Inscryption, which was nominated for Best Indie Game and Best Sim/Strategy Game at this year’s Game Awards 2021 (it was beaten by Kena: Bridge of Spirits and Age of Empires IV, respectively.) His favorite form of entertainment was anything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a developer he’s become fond of is FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Active as a director in the gaming world for 30 years in 2022, Sakurai created the character Kirby at age 19, at which time he directed his first title, Kirby’s Dream Land for the Game Boy. Starting his career at HAL Laboratory, he left the company in 2003. In 2005, he founded the video game company Sora with his wife Michiko. He writes a weekly column for Famitsu magazine and has also done voice acting work in some of his games, most notably providing the voice of King Dedede in both Super Smash Bros and Kirby 64.
Sakurai is known for occasionally playing two characters in Smash at the same time. Upon It Takes Two winning Game of the Year at this year’s Game Awards, the creator took to Twitter to suggest how it may be possible to play the co-op game alone, with two controllers. Basically, he’s still cooler than all of us.