Nintendo’s late CEO Iwata once praised Masahiro Sakurai’s ability to fully visualize a finished product from nothing, and the shocking reveal behind his YouTube channel proves it

Super Smash Bros. and Kirby series creator Masahiro Sakurai just revealed that all of the video lessons on his extensive Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel were written and recorded two and a half years ago. 

Sakurai first launched his channel dedicated to teaching game development know-how in 2022. The creator explains that after finishing work on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate around October 2021, he had six months of “free time” until April 2022, when development of his next (still unannounced) game would begin. Hence, he decided to use this time to prepare the content for his channel. 

Moreover, as revealed in the final episode on Sakurai’s channel, virtually all of the content on it – meaning 256 videos worth of lessons, were planned and scripted by Sakurai in the span of a single month. Filming and editing followed suit in the subsequent months. Sakurai also revealed that although it cost him around 90 million yen (approx. $630,000 USD) to make all the episodes, he has not received any income from all the channel as he decided not to monetize it. However, he sees it as an “investment towards the brighter future of games.” 

Aside from this shocking realization, and the fact that we’ve been watching a Sakurai from the past this whole time, the developer has displayed an astonishing amount of dedication and foresight in running the YouTube channel in this way. 

But almost 20 years ago, Nintendo’s late CEO Satoru Iwata talked about these qualities of Sakurai’s. In the Super Smash Bros. Brawl edition of Nintendo’s “Iwata Asks” series, the CEO said to Sakurai, “To state it simply, you are capable of taking a project with nothing and visualizing a completed game almost perfectly in your head.” He went on to comment that on their joint projects at HAL Laboratory, Sakurai was able to “point out the smallest details even when the product had yet to take shape.”  

These details were apparently “so small and so specific” that Iwata initially doubted Sakurai’s insights, however, things would always turn out exactly the way he described once development progressed. “As it happened over and over again, however, I had little choice but to believe you. I don’t know how, but you’re able to visualize a game right down to its very details, as if the finished game is working inside your mind. If not, how else could you have been right so many times? Even now, Masahiro Sakurai, of all the people that I know, you especially can readily form an image of how a game will look when finished.” Although Iwata was talking about games specifically in this discussion, the qualities he highlighted sound extremely familiar in the light of the newly revealed origin story behind Sakurai’s YouTube channel.  

Sakurai’s upcoming game has been in development for two and a half years and should be receiving an official announcement “sooner or later,” according to the creator.