Masahiro Sakurai has some new fascinating stories to share with us about the development of Super Smash Bros Brawl.
The first revelation is the big shocker of this story, though some people may already know this. When then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced Super Smash Bros Brawl in a press conference in 2005, Sakurai was no longer at HAL Laboratory and had gone freelance. He was just as surprised as everyone, as he did not know that the game was in development or even planned.
Sakurai was not at Nintendo, but working for Nintendo at HAL Laboratory when he led development for Super Smash Bros in the late 1990s and Super Smash Bros Melee in the early 2000s. Sakurai already had a few other projects lined up, including Sega’s CCG based arcade game, Mushiking. While he had the same questions everybody else had, he would soon have the answers.
Satoru Iwata met Sakurai shortly during E3 2005, and offered him the job of director, or as close a job to it, for Super Smash Bros Brawl on the spot. Nintendo wanted to sell the “Nintendo Revolution’s” online capabilities, a few weeks before they would reveal the revolution they had planned with motion controls on the Nintendo Wii.
Fans clamored for online play for Super Smash Bros Melee, and so Iwata chose to reveal Super Smash Bros for the Wii before the company had even started working on it.
Sakurai asked what Nintendo would do if he rejected their offer. Iwata bluntly stated they would rerelease Super Smash Bros Melee and just add online play.
While that could have made a certain set of Super Smash Bros fans happy enough, Sakurai saw that Iwata was struggling to find someone else to head development on the franchise.
And so, Sakurai agreed to head Super Smash Bros development again, but to do this, he had to cancel all his other video game commitments. As it turns out, the only other game he worked on that released during this time was Mushiking. While Mushiking is an obscurity in America, it became a genuine collecting craze, not just in Japan, but across Asian video game arcades.
In an unusual move for Nintendo, they hired Game Arts Co to work on Super Smash Bros Brawl alongside Sakurai. This studio worked on Lunar, Grandia, and Silpheed, so they were quite experienced, but hardly known to be among the Japanese dev elite alongside Capcom and Square.
That did mean that this particular Super Smash Bros was made by a lot of non-Nintendo employees, but perhaps Nintendo’s involvement guaranteed that fans would not even notice.
Sakurai shared his apprehensions at the end of this story that it isn’t clear what could happen to Super Smash Bros after he stops making games. But perhaps it would be OK if future Super Smash Bros games go through some growing pains, and Nintendo learns from that. The likes of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have gone through multiple dramatic reinventions to stay relevant to this day. While those attempts have not always been successful, they have remained relevant nonetheless.
You can watch Sakurai’s latest YouTube video where he shares this story below.
