Masahiro Sakurai launches a YouTube channel with the goal of making games more fun

Game creator Masahiro Sakurai has launched a new YouTube channel called Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games. Sakurai gave his reason for creating the channel by saying, “I want to try and help make games around the world a little more fun,” and explained that it will consist of videos that provide easy-to-understand explanations about various game design elements and methods.  

The channel description provides a brief overview of what viewers can expect: “Join Masahiro Sakurai, director of several Kirby games and the Super Smash Bros. series, as he reflects on his work in the games industry and offers insightful and easy-to-understand advice about game development.” And, as of the time this article was written, there have already been three videos uploaded to the channel.

In the first video, titled “About This Channel,” Sakurai clarifies his intentions by saying, “Don’t expect me to stream games or anything like that — I’ll instead be talking about topics like game development and what makes games fun,” and later adding, “I hope that by covering a variety of topics on this channel, I’ll be able to help more people see what game dev is all about.”

He said that he plans to cover very elementary concepts and will create videos that can be easily understood even by those without any game development experience. Sakurai will not be delving into too much technical detail, claiming that each development environment is vastly different and that some things must be kept as trade secrets.

Fans of Sakurai’s works may be especially interested in the videos because they will feature footage from Super Smash Bros. development builds as well as design documents that were written by Sakurai himself. While Sakurai noted that he has received permission from Nintendo to use these development materials, he stressed that the channel is his personal project and Nintendo is not involved in it.

He also said that he is not creating the channel for profit, and as a result, the videos will be relatively short and will not feature any ads. On the contrary, he mentioned that since he has to pay his video editors and translators, he will lose more money as he creates more videos. However, he does not see this as a problem, saying, “I think of it as an investment in the game industry.”

In his first Design Specifics video, titled “Stop for Big Moments!” Sakurai jumps right into game design concepts by explaining “hit stop.” He talks about the importance of freezing the action for a moment whenever something impactful happens, showing comparisons between gameplay footage with and without hit stop. He shows games that freeze the screen when defeating a boss, and describes that effect as “boss stop,” a term which he coined himself.

By interweaving actual gameplay footage with his explanation, Sakurai made it more interesting and easy to understand, even for someone with no game development experience like myself (the original author of this article).

So far, the content on Sakurai’s new YouTube channel thoroughly embodies his desire to make games around the world more fun. I’m looking forward to seeing what other kind of videos will be posted in the future.

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Sakurai’s daily Super Smash Bros. Ultimate screenshots come to an end after nearly 3 years of updates

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-08-24 15:27 JST)