Masahiro Sakurai has shared his last video on his YouTube channel. While he didn’t announce news about the Switch 2 or the next Super Smash Bros., he has quite a story to tell.
Sakurai shared the story of making his YouTube channel, and while we won’t share all the details, he’s revealed the strange, and nearly uncomfortable levels of his work ethic and dedication.
So, the reason Sakurai made a YouTube channel to begin with because he had a brief amount of downtime. Around July 2021, he was ending work on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. He was asked to prepare a pitch for a new game, which he promptly finished and send back to the unnamed game company who requested it.
This new game proposal was approved on October 2021, around the same time Sakurai’s commitments to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and other game projects had finished. However, Sakurai’s next game wouldn’t start production until April 2022, because the unnamed game company needed time to build the team making it.
Sakurai could have gone on vacation, but ultimately decided to take care of his cat instead. He also thought about the work he had done teaching game development as a freelancer, and about coming up with new opportunities to do so. So that’s why he came up with this YouTube channel, with a meticulously planned program of several topics, simplified to short, easy to understand videos.
However, the way he set about making the channel is something else. Sakurai planned his video lessons and wrote all the scripts for them, in the span of a month. He wrote a staggering 256 episodes in total. He then spent the rest of his free time between 2021 to April 2022 recording the video and audio for all of his videos. Sakurai used his own personal collection of video games and consoles, as well as doing the recording. In other words, he did a huge amount of the work for the channel, videos that were released in a span of two years, in 2021. That’s a full three years ago!
If you’re a YouTuber yourself and feeling a bit insecure about this, you shouldn’t be. As it turns out, Sakurai ended up hiring two production companies to help him. A Japanese video production company named HIKE, as well as a English localization company 8-4, did most of the other work on the videos. But Sakurai still ran the YouTube channel himself, and as the client for HIKE and 8-4, he also supervised their work.
Now, do you remember when I mentioned above that he was waiting for a new game to start work on April 2022? Sakurai released videos on YouTube starting August 24, 2022. So for the past two years, he had been making these videos and working on a new game this whole time. Of course, if he hadn’t made all that preparation in the few months he was free, he would not have been able to run the channel as tight a ship as it was.
If you have the time, the full 46 minute video is worth watching. But we have to wonder about this unnamed game that Sakurai has been working on for two years now. Assuming that the game has not been cancelled yet, it’s possible that Sakurai is still deep in production. Sakurai didn’t name the game or the company he’s working with, so it’s absolutely possible that it is, in fact, the next Super Smash Bros.
But as we mentioned above, Sakurai did not let any real details come out. So we can’t take this anonymous announcement as confirmation. But of course, when that 6th Super Smash Bros. game is finally revealed, Sakurai is likely to confirm that this is what that game was after all. But then again, I almost want Sakurai to surprise all of us with a new project that we didn’t expect, with an equally unexpected partner like Electronic Arts or TenCent.
But at this point, we are speculating on Sakurai’s next game with no basis. You can watch Sakurai’s last YouTube video (at least for now) below.
