Japan · Born 1970 · Sora Ltd. (formerly HAL Laboratory) · Game Director, Designer
Joined HAL Laboratory at nineteen, created Kirby by twenty-two, invented Super Smash Bros. from a prototype that had nothing to do with Nintendo — then quit rather than make sequels forever.
Masahiro Sakurai started at HAL Laboratory in 1989, aged just nineteen. Three years later he had directed his first game, Kirby's Dream Land (1992), and created one of Nintendo's most enduring characters — designing the game around a philosophy of total accessibility, so that a player with no experience of action games could pick it up and enjoy it, floating over any obstacle that defeated them. He followed it with Kirby's Adventure (1993), which introduced the Copy Ability that became the series' defining mechanic, and Kirby Super Star (1996). His second landmark began as something else entirely. In 1998 Sakurai built a prototype fighting game called Dragon King: The Fighting Game — a four-player brawler with no Nintendo characters in it at all. Only later were Mario, Link, Pikachu and the rest dropped into the design, and the resulting Super Smash Bros., released in Japan in January 1999, became an unexpected hit and one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 64. The crucial insight, visible in that origin, is that Smash was a genuinely novel fighting game first and a crossover second — which is precisely why it works. Sakurai directed Super Smash Bros. Melee and then, on 5 August 2003, resigned from HAL Laboratory. His stated reason is unusually pointed for a Japanese industry figure: he wanted more freedom, and he was unhappy with the relentless sequelisation of the business. "It was tough for me," he said shortly afterwards, "to see that every time I made a new game, people automatically assumed that a sequel was coming." He objected to the assumption that sequels simply happen, when in fact many people have to give everything they have to make one. He founded his own company, Sora Ltd., in 2005, and has continued to direct Smash — Brawl, the Wii U and 3DS entries, and Ultimate — alongside Meteos and Kid Icarus: Uprising, while retaining an independence rare among creators so closely identified with Nintendo. From 2022 to 2024 he ran an unusually generous educational YouTube channel breaking down game design principles for anyone who wanted to learn.