Masahiro Sakurai is the man. Anyone who has followed his YouTube series has seen just how much he loves games and the incredible amount of effort that he puts into each title he creates. Even in a basic video, he might slip in some information about his past game development life and how it relates to now. For example, Sakurai posted a video today about playtesting and tied it into the Super Smash Bros franchise. To that end, he revealed for basically half of the series’ life; he was one of the only playtesters trying to get the balance of the characters “just right.”
We’re being literal with our wording here, as Sakurai himself admitted that for the first two games in the fighting game franchise, he was the ONLY playtester! He was the one who had to go in and balance the “parameters” of the characters so that they would feel balanced, unique, and fun. This continued until Super Smash Bros Brawl when he was able to add just four playtesters to the mix. Even then, they didn’t have certain data that they do now to balance things out further.
It wasn’t until the advent of the online age for the series that things grew exponentially, and Masahiro Sakurai was able to rely on the opinions and test data of tournament-style players and beyond to get the proper balancing done. He even admitted that while he did play with others during his lunch break, he only interfered with balancing if he felt a character was losing what made them special.
Sakurai also reiterated the balancing data that he revealed previously, which showcases that the franchise’s roster is actually pretty balanced, despite what people would say.
This further paints a picture of just how incredible Sakurai is and why he’s one of the greatest game developers ever. He had to do the designing and playtesting for the first two games, and they still got done on time! Sakurai himself admitted that he’s not sure how they didn’t get delayed because he was the only one testing games.
It always highlights how game development has grown over the years and how there are numerous ways to analyze play data so that the title can achieve the best results.
Should a new entry in the series be made, Sakurai can take heart in knowing that he doesn’t have to do all the testing himself and that his new balancing guidelines work fine.
