It’s almost funny at times how both art and life can mix in a way that is both obvious and yet surprising. As in, you should expect something to happen, and then when it does happen, you’re honestly pleased about it genuinely because you weren’t sure if it would occur. We’ll stop being vague and note that we’re describing the situation around the YouTube channel created by Masahiro Sakurai. The legendary developer of Kirby, Super Smash Bros, and more made a channel so he could do bite-sized videos about video game development and the various ins and outs of them. He noted that he “wasn’t sure” how much this would be watched or appreciated, but he wanted to put them out there anyway.
Mainly because, by his admission, he’d been asked to do things like speeches at schools/universities or keynote speeches at things like GDC. But he declined because he wanted his reach to go beyond just those who were there—a very honorable thing to do. We’re sure Masahiro Sakurai would be thrilled to know now that the videos he’s been making have already been used in game development courses at schools! As proven by this tweet right here:
So yeah, his videos are being used in actual game design courses, which will no doubt blow his mind when he first hears it and will likely get many other game dev students to try and ask for a similar thing to happen in their schools.
Part of the good parts of this video series is the simple fact that these videos are focused, brief enough, and get to the point of the content. Heck, Sakurai even made a video about being brief when presenting stuff and did the video in about a minute to sell the point!
What’s more, when you hear words of advice from a man like Sakurai, who really is a legend of game design and innovation, you can feel that what he’s saying is the truth because he’s lived it! In one video, he breaks down the importance of showing death in a video game and making it “impactful,” even when it’s just a basic enemy. Many noted that this style might have been started in things like arcade games, but it’s used today in games like Kingdom Hearts and beyond.
Both the English and Japanese versions of Sakurai’s channels have a ton of subscribers, with the English one being almost at 500K at the time of this writing. What’s more, he’s averaging well over 100K per video. If more schools get in on the action? Maybe those numbers will go up even higher!
Source: Twitter
