Masahiro Sakurai emphasizes “not wasting a second of the player’s time” in games 

Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai and Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya recently participated in a live discussion event hosted by Hamster Corporation. The two game developers shared their thoughts about retro arcade games and Hamster Corporation’s “Arcade Archive” series of emulated arcade games. One piece of expert critique offered by Sakurai to the publisher earned a big round of applause from the crowd, and it has to do with how game developers make use of players’ time. 

The Arcade Archive has been re-releasing emulated arcade games from the 70s, 80s and 90s for the past ten years. As a fan of the project (who apparently buys multiple copies of each game that gets released) Sakurai comments that the only thing he would like the publishers to improve is the waiting time before each game launches. 

“When you’re at the arcade, you swiftly jump from one machine to another, switching between various games. But why is it that you don’t get the same impulse with Archive Arcade games despite there being many games to choose from? Rather than just tossing in a coin and getting into the game immediately, you must click an icon, wait for the logo, wait for the title, look at the instructions screen, wait until everything loads, and then you’re finally at the main screen, after which you can start playing. I want you to measure the total time this takes and shorten it by even one second.” 

While Sakurai says this in the context of recreating the sense of speed felt in arcades, he also mentions that not making the player wait is an ideal that he personally pursues when developing games. “For example, I make it so that the player can reduce waiting time to a minimum by mashing the A button.”  

Furthermore, Sakurai reveals that his Kirby Air Ride from 2003 was originally supposed to support Dolby Surround audio, but that he abandoned the idea because he would have had to display the Dolby logo for over one second.  

“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” Sakurai adds. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose.”