Masahiro Sakurai is truly one of the video game industry’s greatest living legends. It’s not just that he was involved in some of the most iconic video game franchises ever made.
Today, as an influencer, Sakurai has gone a long way in bringing the foibles of game development to the public sphere. His YouTube channel is a continuing steady stream of information about how to make video games, where he not only pulls from his own experience, but from what he’s learned from video games made by others. It isn’t quite Iwata Asks – Sakurai has channeled the spirit of that interview series, to make something he is uniquely qualified to share.
Sakurai is also well known as a really addictive gamer, perhaps at a level higher than even most of us are at. Since leaving Nintendo, he has become quite public about owning every platform, and favoring the PlayStation 5 in particular. But then, Sakurai had simply made public what was very much an open secret – that the industry itself plays every game to learn from each other and push the paradigm of game design forward, generation after generation.
For many of us gamers, October 20, 2023 may have been a day of making hard decisions. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder both came out on this day. While there are definitely loyalists who had only a PlayStation 5 or a Nintendo Switch, we know from surveys and studies that in fact, most US gamers have both of those consoles, particularly because they consider their PlayStation 5 their primary console, and they have the Switch so they don’t miss out on exclusives.
But Sakurai was not stuck in any such paralysis of analysis. As it turns out, he already finished both games! Over the weekend! We’ll let Sakurai’s message speak for itself, translated courtesy of MyNintendoNews:
“I completed “Spider-Man 2” and “Super Mario Bros. Wonder” last night. I don’t want the release dates of the big titles to coincide with each other that I need to see…! But I thought both were masterpieces that I would recommend to anyone. The games are amazing these days and I thank you for making them.”
It’s simultaneously high praise that Sakurai would call both of them masterpieces, and impressive that he got through both of them over the weekend, as he tweeted this last Monday. It also reflects the mindset of game developers that perhaps gamers themselves should embrace themselves, to celebrate the games that we are fortunate to play.
