Sakurai on Creating Games: Chat (31 Topics)

Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, shares a wealth of game-development know-how on his YouTube channel “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games”. This article summarizes and restructures the content of that channel by topic.

That said, a summary is only an entry point. So much of the value — Sakurai’s own words, his real-world examples, his pacing, and the footage itself — can only be gotten from the videos. So please don’t stop at reading the article; I strongly encourage you to also watch the original videos embedded under each topic.

From killing input lag to game history, behind-the-scenes of the first Kirby, and memories of Iwata, this is a category you can enjoy with your shoulders relaxed. Here we bring together the key points of all 6 videos in the “Chat” category (31 individual topics), structured in 6 parts following the 6 source videos. Each part opens with its explanatory video, so please watch along.

Part 1: Killing input lag, game awards, software value, WFH support (#01–#09)

This category is literally chat. Even so, it’s mostly game-related talk. With your shoulders relaxed, it’s a chance to touch Sakurai’s thinking and daily life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI5A_WYEmjk

1. Please kill input lag

However responsive a game you make, lag in the display ruins it. When Smash Bros. Ultimate was played live at the E3 Treehouse, the lag was quite large and hurt the control feel. Many setup staff must have touched it, yet it was overlooked — meaning lag is hard for many people to notice.

Lag causes include display lag (from post-processing) and response speed (the LCD pixels’ rate of change), and display lag is especially the issue. Check whether your TV supports Game Mode or a low-latency mode, and use it. Without one, turning off every “beautify” mode may improve it. If only audio is delayed (via a home theater, say), you can only patiently find a low-lag connection. At 60 frames, one frame of lag is about 16.67 ms. Please do kill input lag, because a game’s comfort changes with it, he urges.

2. Awards given to games

It’s a bit rich to say while doing Japan Game Awards activities, but — who awards games, and by what right? Sakurai’s view: “the one that person thought was good is number one.” Deciding a single first place for games, which have many values and directions, isn’t something he agrees with much. A game’s goodness is each its own direction, not a rank.

So why have awards? To bring joy to makers and the fans who support them. It’s good for makers of good things to have joy beyond sales, and it should be welcomed. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t see awards as a race — one thing ranking up doesn’t mean another ranks down.

The Game Designers Award, where Sakurai chairs the judging, themes originality and gives awards by collecting votes from directors. The Japan Game Awards use vote counts as a standard, which tends toward popularity votes, but there’s value in directors who’ve tasted the agony of originality picking things up, unrelated to commerce. To cultivate new eyes too, it’s good to have awards not decided by vote count alone.

3. A recommendation: exercise while gaming

Games take time, which is a waste. So Sakurai overlaps game time with exercise time — specifically, gaming while pedaling an exercise bike. Exercise is painful and doesn’t last, but while gaming you forget the pain and can exercise longer than you’d think. Convince yourself there’s speed, like in a racing game, and the effect is high (don’t overdo it). He sometimes pedals for two hours.

He often also watches a show on another TV while pedaling. Sakurai calls himself “exercise-averse,” but there’s a clear difference in work efficiency between exercising and not. He quit the gym in the COVID era and tends to be unhealthy, so he wants a habit of moving even at home. An adjustable dumbbell (twist the grip to change the weight) was handy, but 500 steps in his building’s stairwell injured his leg, so he quit — beware overdoing anything.

4. The value of game software

“Aren’t games expensive?” is often said, but Sakurai thinks they’re quite cheap. By one adult’s sense, it’s rare to be able to offer something you can spend this much time on at this price. Meals, drinking parties, movies, drives, trips — anything spends money.

Compared to that, even a AAA title gives dozens of hours of play for under ¥10,000. A game’s scale and deliverables are dozens of times bigger than before, yet the price hasn’t risen much. Knowing the huge money moving in both production and promotion, he can’t help thinking it’s cheap. Lately subscriptions — an even better-value entertainment — have appeared. A good era for consumers, but makers also suffer competition with past works. Buy what you want to play without hesitation, and with a subscription, play and support the makers, he says.

5. My cat Fukurashi

This one’s completely unrelated to games. Asked via the “Shot of the Day” on Twitter to open up, here’s his beloved cat Fukurashi (female). The word Sakurai mutters most at home is “cute.” Her voice is high, she rubs up against him — truly adorable. The most cat-like and willful, but she’s the king, so it can’t be helped. Giving her a Churu treat after his bath is a daily routine — a relaxing bit of chat.

6. The past is the past, now is now

Many may think “games were better in the old days.” The music was easy to remember, new titles kept popping out, games had mystery and fantasy… An adventure achieved through your own trial and error was the best.

But the past is the past, now is now. From the future, this very moment is the past too, so enjoying now to the fullest is best. A game’s fun isn’t absolute but relative, changing with the era, environment, and level of tech. Old games have appeal and inventiveness, but their overall fun doesn’t reach today’s refined, larger games. Works met in sensitive years stay deep, but it’s a waste to be unable to enjoy modern games because they fall short of those. It’s grateful that today you can enjoy old games in some form too. Challenging new things is good, he says.

7. Sora Ltd.

About Sakurai’s company. A limited company (yūgen-gaisha) can no longer be newly founded since the 2006 Companies Act, but he keeps it as-is because it’s interesting. Sora Ltd. is a company he founded to contract with others; it has almost no general game-production staff and isn’t recruiting.

Usually, going independent means building a company and hiring staff, but you often get swamped with CEO duties and can’t focus on making. Sakurai thinks it’s also interesting for one director to roam around solo, and he often makes games as a hired gun for other companies. His income is often on a contract where he takes no fee during development and earns per sales after release. If it falls through midway, income is zero (even without fault) — high risk. He does it deliberately, to share the risk that a maker profits only once it sells software. Please don’t send résumés; he sometimes wants staff but would rather struggle in another form, he says.

8. Download or package?

When buying a console game, are you a package or download person? Packages remain as objects and can be collected; downloads can be bought the moment you feel like it and don’t take space. Sakurai is firmly a download person. He buys lots of software but isn’t a collector type, and after going independent couldn’t secure storage space.

He weights what he played at the time over the package. But console download sales are expensive — you provide the hardware and there are no extras, yet it can be little different from the package version, he grumbles. Still, the freedom to choose anywhere is grateful. As someone who plays a lot, he’d like it if you could sort by your own folders. Note he’s an e-book person too, with over 6,000, and space matters above all.

9. Sora’s WFH support measures

Smash Bros. Ultimate switched fully to telework in the COVID era (right at the start of April 2020). Telework for a team that boasts high unity is hard, but necessary. A survey showed remarkable improvement in commute, climate control, and toilet waiting, while problems came up like no chairs or reference monitors, slow lines, can’t test-play.

Desks and chairs especially break your body, so Sora Ltd. made a budget and provided WFH support. Staff freely chose what they needed for telework and sent the Amazon product page; Sora ordered and shipped it to their address, no return needed, theirs to keep. Desks, chairs, monitors, webcams, headsets, and more were distributed. Since a mixed team meant applications/approvals at each company take time, Sora covered it to tackle development with maximum speed. It was greatly appreciated. The team kept teleworking to the end. As one director’s sense, the work pace feels about 30% slower, but he wants to be able to proceed flexibly in any state, he closes.

Part 2: Competing with the past, eye strain, master-up, the first Kirby’s making (#10–#14)

The midpoint highlight is the last topic, the making of the first Kirby’s Dream Land. A dense installment revealing the many low-capacity ingenuities and even the roots of Smash Bros.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAfCMAA5LeE

10. Competing with the past

Game-making is harsh, but the world of video production is harder, Sakurai feels. Subscriptions are a dream of unlimited viewing, but today’s works are lined up and forced to compete on equal footing with works from decades ago. Viewers’ time is fought over with new and old works at the same value — a fairly brutal competition.

In that respect, games still have it better in terms of competing with the past, perhaps. Many old games are ported, but they aren’t fought over on equal footing. Tech advances are remarkable, you can’t always be satisfied with old graphics or controls, and 1980s games are small-scale and quick to play, not measurable in the same length as a movie.

Entertainment like film, drama, anime, and games is a market supported precisely because makers face it out of love. To stand a head above there, making something more novel, unique to that work, is best. Being conscious that competition runs between past and present can’t hurt, and broadening your view is good. “I’ll keep at it on my own channel too,” he closes with humor.

11. Games and eye strain

Sakurai can’t really play smartphone games. His eyes tire extremely. The Switch’s handheld mode is the same; he’s TV-mode only. He avoids long play held in hand. When the eye-to-monitor distance gets under 60cm at his workspace, eyes tire fast. Originally somewhat farsighted, focusing up close gets harder every year.

After developing the new Kid Icarus he felt his eyesight drop, and an eye exam measured 2.0 (Japanese scale) then; now it’s 1.5. He’s now more comfortable with the monitor 1m+ away, which needs a bigger monitor but is comfortable. The extreme eye fatigue and dry eye during Smash Ultimate’s development improved considerably once it ended. There are methods — brightness adjustment, glasses, drops, supplements — but in the end, changing the environment works most. That said, he spends nights hanging an iPad to read, dropping it beside him when sleepy — “that’s that,” he chuckles.

12. Master-up

Delivering the finished version is called master-up. Thought to be a refreshing moment, but it isn’t necessarily. There must have been harsh calls to cut things to get there, and if online updates are possible, you keep solving the problems you missed. If anything, you’re more often wounded, he says. Still, he wants to tell the staff who shared the hardships, “thank you for your work.”

In the Famicom and Game Boy eras with no net, it was a hand-carry of clutching the finished ROM and personally taking it by Shinkansen to Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ or factory. Carrying a ROM — a lump of merit — far away, with no hope (or freshly made), was a fairly tense journey. In the era of being etched into a ROM with no updates, the end was crisply set, but lately, with online updates, the sense of closure is faint. Reflecting that so many game developers reach completion with such harsh feelings, he congratulates everyone worldwide who’s reached master-up.

13. The Family Computer

Sakurai is one of the few directors who has developed Famicom software (Kirby’s Adventure). Few of his generation have Famicom dev experience, and even early-entry Sakurai just barely. The Famicom launched in Japan on July 15, 1983. It was outstandingly well-made for the time — beautiful graphics, ringing music, smooth fast screen processing, an easy-to-use controller. And it wasn’t expensive, with fun software. That Donkey Kong was playable almost as-is was a shock.

Sakurai bought one in 1983 too. The controller then had square buttons (rubber, prone to sinking in; only for the first year-plus). Overseas it arrived two years later in 1985 as the NES, North America first. In those two years, game tech surged in Japan (launch-year Mario Bros. 24KB → 1985’s Super Mario Bros. 40KB). Overseas, low-capacity-era works were mixed in, so some were surprised by the volume gap. It evolved via custom chips and the expansion-sound terminal the Japanese version had. 1988’s Dragon Quest III was a social phenomenon. Had there been no Famicom, the game industry’s shape would differ; it was a dream machine at the time — something he wanted to mention.

14. Behind the scenes of the first Kirby’s Dream Land

The presentation “Behind the scenes of the first Kirby’s Dream Land,” given at the 2017 Kirby 25th Anniversary Concert, specially re-performed. The first Kirby was 1992 on Game Boy. Copy Abilities didn’t exist yet, and he drafted the plan around May 1990, when Sakurai was 19. A plan to convey games’ fun to beginners — short enough for the practiced to finish in 20 minutes, yet it sold over 5 million worldwide.

The dev tool was a Twin Famicom with a homemade trackball attached, loading the dev tool from disk to become the dev machine itself. A high-performance tool unseen elsewhere — an “all-purpose tool” that could make pixel art, character motion, backgrounds, and titles. The targeted capacity was 512KB, and character design turning this low capacity to advantage is everywhere. Waddle Dee and Waddle Doo share the back-side art for 2 characters at 1.5’s worth of capacity; Whispy Woods is one image flipped vertically into three, pasted on the background; Kracko and Gordo also use flips and single-pattern reuse. A continuous ingenuity to pack each character.

Even more surprising: enemies do no terrain collision. A slope-descending motion is pre-made and just placed to match the background. It seems inefficient, but it’s light to process, a hard-won advantage on Game Boy. And the biggest find — the first Kirby’s proposal already wrote “the player is launched, and a miss when going off-screen” and “the launch changes with health.” That’s exactly Smash’s accumulated-damage system. It was already conceived in 1990, at the first Kirby, with the proposal itself as evidence. Why did he put it in Smash? The answer: “honestly forgot, the end.” From a bonus about Meta Knight’s mask (the slit design revisited per era) to a prototype character from Super Star, the stance of finishing the image as much as possible from the early stage so staff can proceed without hesitation ran throughout.

Part 3: Cancellation calls, 10 years of PRESS START, childhood games (#15–#17)

This time, a three-parter: works that never came out, a game-music concert, and Sakurai’s boyhood. An installment touching the usually-untold backstage and his origins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4eixzKiphI

15. Cancellation

There are heaps of works that were being developed but never came out. Sakurai too has watched, as a developer, all kinds of titles get cancelled. Many quietly breathed their last before any public announcement, including some startling series. Months or years not seeing the light of day comes hard to a developer’s heart.

On the other hand, making it as a company employee, you should get paid even with no results (if the company isn’t gone). It’s the company that takes the full brunt of cancellation or delay. It loses revenue and maintenance costs are a loss, so even one miss can topple a company. Cancellation is often judged by the balance of future cost and profit outlook, and pulling out appropriately when you can’t bear the loss-cutting is also a correct business call. Developers should be aware of risk and assumptions too, and not think a thing gets completed just by doing the assigned work. The more you can survey what’s appropriate toward completion, the more advantageous. It’s grateful when it releases safely, was the talk.

16. PRESS START (game-music concert)

For 10 years from 2006, Sakurai hosted the annual game-music concert “PRESS START.” An omnibus of various games, mainly in Tokyo plus Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya, and overseas in Shanghai and Paris. It began through the connection of the 2002 FF and Smash Melee concert, with conductor Mr. Takemoto, composers Mr. Uematsu and Mr. Sakai, scenario writer Mr. Nojima, and others. What could have ended as drinks-table talk actually came true.

Long ago, at Prof. Yamaguchi’s game-music concert, hearing Donkey Kong Country in live performance, he thought a truly giant Kong might appear — he learned the power of live performance woven on the spot. He speaks with respect for the predecessors who did status-raising work in an era when game-music orchestras were poorly understood.

Production started with song selection. In practice only Sakurai, among the members, knows games well, so he gathered sources and had them heard in meetings to narrow down. Footage was kept restrained, since showing too much makes the performance itself not promotional. Each show was mostly sold out and got results, but researching 14–16 songs (about 60 incl. medleys) on the night, rejects included, between his main jobs was unsustainable. Still, starting with a goal of “ten years” and completing it is splendid. Game-music concerts later increased and it finished its role, but COVID put live performance in dire straits. The chance to enjoy it live is irreplaceable, so when chances increase, do go, he says.

17. Talking about childhood games

Completely as chat, how Sakurai touched games as a child. His first memory is a Pong-like game moving paddles with a variable resistor. Turn the dial and things in the TV move directly, glaring brightly — a huge thrill for child Sakurai. Around the Space Invaders boom of 1978, he was 7–8. An era of diverse arcade games proliferating.

Sundays were family shopping trips, and clutching the ¥200 (four ¥50 plays) from his parents, he headed straight for the arcade corner. Out of money, he played on hobby-shop demo units, and his parents came to take him home — a tale from an era when acting apart from parents was normal. He joined game and RC contests at the Tachikawa arcade and department stores, sometimes going home with prizes from different contests in both arms. He was fairly good at games. Nihon Falcom was in Tachikawa, with a PC shop and dev room combined, which may have been his first time seeing a maker’s production site live, he recalls.

What you enjoy and the joys you feel as a child greatly affect your thinking as an adult. Now, as a maker, he may be affecting the childhood of some unknown someone. In CoroCoro Comic’s 2019 data, the most popular game was Smash Bros. Ultimate, and himself, who started from “the thrill of things glaring and moving in the screen,” connects across generations — “I wonder how a generation with high-level games from the start feels,” he closes the childhood chat.

Part 4: Forming the Brawl team, guidelines, rare goods, pixel art by numbers (#18–#24)

This time’s highlight is the backstage of forming the Smash Bros. Brawl team. How freelancer Sakurai came to make Brawl is told.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxhCfTUkkOQ

18. Forming the Brawl team

The backstage of forming the team, touched on in the Game Concepts edition’s Brawl topic. As a premise, Sakurai had quit HAL Laboratory, which made up through Melee, and gone freelance. In May 2005, the day before E3, a Nintendo presentation announced a new Smash, but Sakurai hadn’t been told anything at that point.

During E3 in Los Angeles, he was called to the top floor of President Iwata’s hotel. The request was “please make Smash in a form as close to director as possible.” They announced it because, in Nintendo’s Wi-Fi network rollout, Smash was the top wish in both Japan and the US. The dev setup was entirely undecided.

Freelance Sakurai had already taken other software requests, and butting in didn’t make sense. Asked “what if I refuse,” Iwata said “I might instruct it to focus only on Wi-Fi support and not touch Melee’s 26 characters.” That would be a problem as a new entry, but probably they couldn’t picture someone suddenly making a new Smash, Sakurai says. What decided him to take it is represented by the words of Zelda producer Aonuma: “Sakurai not being involved means the end of Smash Bros.” — only he can do it, he’s wanted, and the originators request him too. He resolved himself.

Since Smash is impossible without being dedicated, he declined everything except the in-progress Mushiking (he’s still sorry). Production was based not at HAL Laboratory but at Game Arts, just after they’d finished a versus game (introduced by Miyamoto). The staff had played Melee so much their analog sticks wore down like erasers, full of motivation. Setting up a new office in Takadanobaba, about 100-plus people built Brawl. For a series entry not handled by the original company, organized around a freelance director, is very rare. There’s a way of thinking to remove personality-dependence, but for now he can’t picture a Smash without himself, he says frankly.

19. Guidelines

Products have guidelines, and what doesn’t meet them can’t be offered as a product or service. For example, Tetris has rules — like a piece rotated on the ground doesn’t lock and can be shifted infinitely — unified in guidelines set by The Tetris Company around 2002. Old Tetris had scattered control and rotation rules and was hard to play, so this is meaningful worldwide and in common.

On the other hand, makers want to create freely, so guidelines often become a hindrance. You meet multiple guidelines — ratings, platform, shop, online service, your own company — so contradictions arise. An intended expression can’t be done due to a guideline, and if players don’t know, the impression isn’t good. Tetris reportedly grants exceptions when arcades have profitability issues. In the end, guidelines are decided by people too. If allowed, any guideline could be made more flexible — because a good thing being made is best of all, he says.

20. A look at rare goods

Sakurai says he’s “not a collector,” but by his position he owns various rare game goods. He introduces some that can’t circulate on the market: a Wii Remote with a caricature (a Nintendo gift right after Mii’s release), 3D-printed prototypes of Pit and Palutena made for the new Kid Icarus’s 3D display, software with Miyamoto’s autograph, and an elaborate new-Kid-Icarus autograph drawn by manga artist Shigeyuki Fukumi.

Further, an Xbox 360 Elite with Sakurai’s name on the plate (a gift from Microsoft; the body died of the Red Ring, but the name plate carried over through generations), and Sega’s quasi-developer ID number 4, earned in Sega’s late-1980s plan call (he recalls submitting an action game with an Active-Time-Battle-like feel). This was the connection with Sega, and even after entering the industry he visited repeatedly via Mushiking, Smash’s Sonic, and After Burner. A look mostly at one-of-a-kind items unlikely to be priced, fun just to see.

21. Game & Watch screens

Game & Watch is Nintendo’s LSI game series sold from 1980. During Smash’s development he received precious LCD patterns as reference materials, and this time, with Nintendo’s special permission, he introduces several patterns.

It’s a mechanism where pre-drawn patterns on the LCD light up and go dark, packed with era-specific inventiveness. Fun just to look at, conveying how they made a game work within limited expression — a precious reference reveal.

22. Creators change too

Entering the industry early, Sakurai was surrounded by elders. Seniors and industry heavyweights kept disappearing as years passed, and he sometimes wonders “where are they, doing what?” Heaps of people vanish from the game industry in their prime.

Even if a creator you know goes quiet, please don’t say “that guy’s finished.” Surprisingly, some succeed greatly in other fields (made money on patents, do cutting-edge things in another industry). Even if their activity isn’t prominent, the person may have found fulfilling work. Starting something different with age is natural; staying in the same position may not be the norm. A maker won’t always keep meeting the fans’ wishes of the time, but it’s better not to deny that — they may be more wanted elsewhere. Everyone freely chooses their path and works hard on a different stage. “For now I’m making games while offering this show too — this is also a result of shifting my position a little,” he reflects.

23. Drawing pixel art by numbers

Long ago, to make games on what were called microcomputers, there were no graphics tools and you had to place dots by numbers (data) (around the early 1980s). He explains how the micro kids of the time drew pictures.

The key is hexadecimal. Decimal carries over with 0–9, but hexadecimal assigns A–F above 9, cycling at F. One hex digit can express the fill pattern of 4 dots wide (1 = rightmost, F = all four filled). Two digits is 8 dots wide, and with 8 rows, you get one 8×8-dot picture. Often drawn on graph paper and read by eye-counting; Sakurai drew a cross and picked up rough positions.

For color, like the Famicom’s three colors, you overlay two same-size dot-data sheets and express transparency + three colors by “none / one only / both.” Data compression too (writing “0×8” is shorter than “000”). Today it’s not just easier but requires more complex techniques, so it’s no comparison, but looking at the origin is interesting. Recalling borrowing a friend’s pocket computer to mess with games during class, he laughs, “Better to take classes seriously.”

24. Turning presents into play

Especially before COVID, when working in the office, he often did present plans for staff. Games he got from makers but had duplicates of, things bought twice by mistake, expensive items like graphics cards and gaming monitors, Smash-event goods… Since they could be put to good use, he gave them to staff.

Rather than just handing them out, make the drawing itself a sideshow. Collect applicants, list them in the daily-report page, and draw by win-and-advance rock-paper-scissors, a settle in in-development Smash, “first to cast Megante wins,” “priority to whoever’s wish arrived closest to 0 seconds,” etc. (the rule hidden at first). Gamifying the drawing into an event also became staff-bonding activity. If you’re going to give, the one who has fun wins. Lately, every year on his birthday he gets blessings from staff — a sign of a good director-staff relationship. Such development is good, he warmly closes.

Part 5: A world with no footprints, legendary 1986, storage, gaming to live music (#25–#28)

This time, a varied four-parter: how to enjoy a work, game history, storage, and a live-music performance. An installment glimpsing Sakurai’s ways and hobbies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkUvN0cxDrA

25. A world with no footprints

Sakurai likes a way of enjoying a work like walking alone on snow no one has stepped on. Knowing nothing, no one’s tracks ahead — in that sense, he prefers offline solo to online multiplayer.

For a work he decides to enjoy, he thoroughly prevents spoilers. If a topic comes up, he shuts out all info; if a trailer shows in a theater, he closes his eyes. He doesn’t watch strategy sites or let’s-plays, and even when stuck, checking is a last resort. He wants to view it with no bias, taking only what he himself thought as everything. That way, he can enjoy 100% of the emotion.

Today you hit spoilers fast, and scenario-based works are tough. But he dares to recommend sometimes playing relying only on your own feel — at least what you can feel grows greatly. For studying a work too, nothing beats it; look up others’ impressions after you’re done. He’s aware it’s behind the times, but he enjoys works with freshness. Facing works with all sorts of surprise, and the people who create such enjoyment are truly amazing, he says.

26. Legendary 1986

If naming the single most amazing year in the game industry, Sakurai wants to say 1986. That year, many famous titles that later became series and lived on were born (and that most of them have appeared in Smash in some form is amazing too).

Why the rush? In 1986 the Disk System launched, expanding capacity dramatically, and Mega-ROMs appeared, surging what was possible at once. Games were on a tremendous upswing, with console, arcade, and PC competing fiercely, each playing to its strengths. It’s inevitable that people are drawn to hardware and software that keep getting more amazing. It was also the year the NES launched in Europe (North America the year prior); in Japan, hidden characters and secret techniques were a fad, an era of high surprise and joy toward unknown information. On the flip side, the bloating and rising difficulty were too harsh for the uninitiated, he notes as a real-time-generation member. As an aside, 1986 was the year Luxo Jr. (Pixar) released, the dawn of entertainment CG. We’re on the extension of the road predecessors opened, so he wants to make a new road, he closes.

27. How to store things

A look at Sakurai’s storage techniques. With a huge number of games, storage is life-or-death, and since he doesn’t sell to used shops, packages take space. Reluctantly disposing of packages, here are his space-saving ideas:

• Famicom carts in cassette-tape cases (labeled with title and release year)
• The overwhelmingly numerous CD-type media in nonwoven sleeves by platform (Blu-ray fine so far too)
• GameCube’s small discs in single-CD size, PSP’s UMDs fit perfectly in small cases
• Controllers gathered on a shelf, frequently-used ones on side hooks
• Old hardware to a vendor storage in cardboard (they ship them back individually)

The ultimate is a custom-made game wood cabinet. Six doors store different consoles, freely switchable with a remote-equipped selector. It consolidates Xbox Series X, PS5, Switch, PS4, PS3, Wii U, and mini consoles. Considering heat, when in use you tuck the doors back, remove the back panel, and for the especially hot Xbox Series X and PS5 remove the top too. Cables go straight down from the rear center, outlets with per-unit on/off switches. A supremely convenient item whose dimensions he designed himself; he has two, for his room and the living room. Organizing is a pain, but not doing it now makes it more painful. By trade, old games sometimes help (like this show’s footage), so he’s glad he stored them properly.

28. Gaming to live performance

Have you ever played a game backed by a full orchestra’s live performance? Sakurai has. At PRESS START 2012, he played Chapter 12, the air battle of Kid Icarus: Uprising, with the orchestra matching the developments. The air battle is five minutes. The orchestra had to match the timing of destroying mid-bosses and so on.

And at the highest difficulty of 9.0, a harsh setting where the player could be downed in one hit. A game over would interrupt the performance, with no second time and the audience losing out — that tension. Thus a live of game and performance began, and the lucky audience surely held their breath.

PRESS START lives and dies on being live. A one-time delight; the performance is played, flows, and ends on the spot. There’s goodness precisely because of that, and being able to attempt such a live was truly good — probably unforgettable for life, Sakurai says. The video shows what Chapter 12’s air battle is like, alongside the PRESS START performance. With Pit and Palutena’s banter up to stopping the Reset Bomb and storming the fortress — it became an experience you can’t taste elsewhere.

Part 6: Make anything a versus game, CRTs, about Iwata (#29–#31)

The close of the Chat category. Lastly, memories of Satoru Iwata, who was Sakurai’s greatest understander.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4iOB2qiB4k

29. Make anything a versus game

Before COVID, guests visited Sakurai’s home. With abundant games, there’s no shortage of things to play. Among them, he sometimes did a “simultaneous-progress versus”: running the same game on two at once and racing progress. Two start at the same time, the first to be downed loses, or the higher score wins.

This is also play he did in a collaboration with GameCenter CX (Sakurai and Kacho Arino raced the same game). It especially suits arcade games where you miss easily. Set a goal and “first to defeat 3 slimes wins” makes even Dragon Quest a versus game. Seeing the rival’s progress excites a lot, and once settled you switch fast to the next game, so playing dozens, you get all sorts of game muscles tested. You need two copies of the same software, but among friends you could pool Nintendo Switch Online. Try a versus of a non-versus game, he recommends.

30. CRTs

Unfamiliar to many now, old games used CRTs. He chats as part of the record. A CRT is a vacuum inside, firing an electron beam to make phosphors glow red, green, and blue. A thin beam draws line by line, left to right at high speed, forming the image by its afterimage. Hence the screen flickers a little. Up to around the Super Famicom, N64, and GameCube it was CRTs, deep and large, so many lined figures on top.

There are three gaming traits. First, fast response — faster response speed than LCD, with no buffer or video processing in between, which high-scorers sometimes insist on. Next, a glaring screen — as a light emitter, white shines differently, and some like picture-making that includes halation (Sakurai does). And light guns work — the light gun of the time was like a camera; pull the trigger and it judges where the scanline is drawing, shows a white frame on the judgment target, and catching it is a hit. It’s a mechanism hard to make work on LCD.

Note that NTSC scanlines are basically 525. Drawing odd lines, then even, in an interlace method, game machines expressed 60 frames per second by drawing different pictures on odd and even. In the Famicom era there was also the concept of a safe frame — since CRTs cut off the screen edges, characters breaking near there was no problem at the time. It was a big premise that old games displayed on CRTs, and checkered pixel art and such felt a completely different way than now, was the talk.

31. About Iwata

The final chat. He must speak of Satoru Iwata. As a channel whose creed is keeping it short, it’s only a fraction of memories, but he prefaces that he hopes it becomes a record seen through one person’s eyes.

They met at HAL Laboratory’s interview, where Iwata was the interviewer (then development head). Their actual ages and entry times were about 10 years apart. What stood out was his fast typing and his unclouded smile. An interviewer should be nervous too, yet he talked as if having the time of his life — that was the impact. After entering development, Iwata was on the management side and thus distant to Sakurai, but he was someone who would dive into trouble and improve it. He was never told anything about the work content, probably trusted and entrusted.

Around the first Kirby, HAL Laboratory fell into management trouble, and Iwata took on rebuilding as president. Pay never dropped, and a small bonus even came. Adventure, though a second work by a newcomer, was made with other departments mobilized too, leaving a good result. The only time Sakurai had Iwata directly program for him in game-making was “Dragon King: The Fighting Game,” the N64 Smash prototype. Amid busyness, on his days off, he made it looking very much like he was enjoying it. Iwata also picked up the “Brothers” in “Smash Brothers” — the nuance of a little quarrel among comrades who aren’t kin, not merely fighting.

Later Iwata moved to Nintendo, but when Smash Melee was at its crunch and bugs broke out frequently, though he was head of corporate planning, he directly found and fixed bugs beside the other programmers. Reading others’ code is hard, yet he pulled it off. Without that, Melee might not have released within 2001, he reflects. “Iwata was, at least among those I know, the smartest person. Not so much sense as advancing the best path by logic. A hard studier, he thought carefully about people’s psychology, and could analyze and propose even in moments that would anger you, without showing it.”

Becoming Nintendo’s president was surprising, but made sense. The “Iwata Asks” and Nintendo Direct visible to ordinary customers were novel, thanks to Iwata. Even after becoming president, they met often; in Tokyo, amid busyness, he’d come around the company himself to invite Sakurai directly. He began falling ill in 2014, and in 2015, after Smash 4 released, when Sakurai drove him about an hour and a half to Narita Airport was their last exchange. “I can eat this much meat now,” he said happily, still seeming well. That July, a planned reunion didn’t come true, and the news of his passing arrived.

“Iwata was my greatest understander. A person of virtue, a constant hard worker, full of service spirit, who changed the game industry.” Had he not met Iwata first, what Sakurai is doing would be entirely different. Lastly, touching on how Iwata dressed up as all sorts of things in Nintendo Direct, becoming like a comedy video, his son says “he was doing it with gusto” — with such an episode, the Chat category quietly closes.

Summary

We’ve now gone through all 6 videos and 31 topics of the “Chat” category. Finally, let’s recap the key points of each part (= each source summary video) by individual topic.

Part 1: Killing input lag, game awards, software value, WFH support (#01–#09)

Part 2: Competing with the past, eye strain, master-up, the first Kirby’s making (#10–#14)

Part 3: Cancellation calls, 10 years of PRESS START, childhood games (#15–#17)

Part 4: Forming the Brawl team, guidelines, rare goods, pixel art by numbers (#18–#24)

Part 5: A world with no footprints, legendary 1986, storage, gaming to live music (#25–#28)

Part 6: Make anything a versus game, CRTs, about Iwata (#29–#31)

There’s a lot here, but I hope you’ll revisit it starting from whichever part caught your interest. Please also check out the related categories.