Masahiro Sakurai

Masahiro Sakurai (桜井政博, born August 3, 1970) is a Japanese video game director and game designer best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series.¹³¹⁵ He was born in Musashimurayama, Tokyo.¹⁶²¹ Sakurai directed his first game, Kirby’s Dream Land, at the age of 19, and has since become the director and public face of Super Smash Bros., Nintendo’s crossover fighting game.¹ He operates as a freelance creator through his own company, Sora Ltd..¹⁵¹⁷

Early life and entry into games

Sakurai’s interest in games took hold while he was studying industrial design at school, where he had striven to become an engineer before deciding he might make games instead.¹ For a two-year period during school he worked a part-time job to fund the purchase of games, which he played as research, deliberately seeking out games he did not like or find interesting because they proved more informative.¹¹⁹ Between 1987 and 1988, a 17-year-old Sakurai was among 29 winners of a story-recruitment campaign that Sega? ran with the magazine Beep! for the then-upcoming Phantasy Star II; he won the “Game System Award” for a battle-system concept, attended a planning meeting with the development team, and later used the recognition to advance his professional image.¹⁴ He was hired by HAL Laboratory? at the age of 18 after graduating from high school.¹⁴

HAL Laboratory and Kirby

Sakurai joined HAL Laboratory in 1989.¹³¹⁵¹⁷ There he conceived a new Game Boy game aimed at beginning players, in which any player could reach the ending; during development he created a placeholder — a smiling blob — that became the star of the game and was first named Popopo before becoming Kirby.³⁷ The character was made pink at Sakurai’s insistence, over Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s preference for yellow.³⁷ The resulting game, Kirby’s Dream Land, was released on the Game Boy in 1992, with Sakurai credited as director and chief designer.¹³¹⁹ He followed it with Kirby’s Adventure for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993 and Kirby Super Star for the Super NES in 1996, among other titles in the series.¹³¹⁴¹⁹

Super Smash Bros.

Sakurai devised the concept for Smash in 1998, building a prototype known as Dragon King: The Fighting Game, a four-player battle title he developed largely on his own with HAL president Satoru Iwata assisting part-time as a programmer.¹⁴¹⁹ The prototype originally featured no existing Nintendo properties, and Sakurai focused on unique platform-fighter mechanics to differentiate it from traditional fighting games.¹⁴ Deciding that well-known Nintendo characters would give the game atmosphere and a unique selling point, he added them without first seeking approval, presenting a working prototype before asking permission.¹⁴¹⁹ The final product, Super Smash Bros., was released for the Nintendo 64 in Japan in January 1999 and became an unexpected hit and one of the best-selling Nintendo 64 games.¹⁴

Sakurai has attributed the game’s concern for beginners to an encounter at a Japanese arcade, where he beat what turned out to be a total beginner badly at King of Fighters ‘95 and worried he had put the player off the game for good.¹²³ He was named head of production for Super Smash Bros. Melee, again developed at HAL, and recalled a “destructive lifestyle” of short weekends and no time off across 13 months of work.¹⁴ Unveiled at E3 2001 and released that November, Melee surpassed its predecessor and became the GameCube’s highest-selling game.¹⁴

Departure from HAL and Sora Ltd.

Sakurai resigned from HAL Laboratory in 2003 — dated to August 5 by some accounts and to June by others — shortly after the release of Kirby Air Ride.^1314153 He said he had grown tired of the industry’s growing focus on sequels, remarking that “every time I made a new game, people automatically assumed that a sequel was coming”.³¹⁵ He later clarified that his departure had nothing to do with losing interest in Kirby, saying he “wouldn’t mind working anywhere as long as I get to create new things”.²¹² After leaving HAL, he collaborated with Tetsuya Mizuguchi at Q Entertainment to create the falling-tile puzzle game Meteos, released for the Nintendo DS in March 2005.¹⁴¹⁵ He also began writing a weekly column for the magazine Famitsu, which he continued from 2003 to 2021.¹⁵¹

On September 30, 2005, Sakurai announced that he had formed his own company, Sora Ltd..⁸¹⁴¹⁵ At E3 2005, Iwata revealed that a new Super Smash Bros. would come to the Wii with online play out of the box; only afterward did Iwata offer the project to Sakurai, who accepted.⁵⁹¹⁴¹⁹ Sora Ltd. began development of Super Smash Bros. Brawl in collaboration with Game Arts staff in late 2005, and the game was released in January 2008.¹⁴ During its development Sakurai personally wrote all of the roughly 300 posts for the game’s official “Smash Bros. DOJO!!” website over nearly 11 months, updating five days a week.⁴¹⁰

Later career

Following Brawl, Sakurai and Iwata formed a Nintendo subsidiary, Project Sora, to develop a new entry in the Kid Icarus series, the first in 21 years.¹⁴ The result, Kid Icarus: Uprising, released for the Nintendo 3DS on March 22, 2012, was Project Sora’s only game before the studio was dissolved on June 30, 2012.⁶¹⁴ Sakurai then directed Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, released in 2014 in collaboration with Namco Bandai, followed by Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which attempted to unite all of the series’ 60-plus previous characters.⁶¹³¹¹⁹

Sakurai’s working method avoids directly hiring or managing employees; instead he partners with other game companies, which he says lets him stay creative without being overwhelmed by the duties of running a company.¹⁷ He has said this style is possible only because of the track record and trust he built through Kirby and Smash Bros..¹⁷

On August 23, 2022, Sakurai launched a YouTube channel in English and Japanese, Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, devoted to game development and what makes games fun.¹⁵¹⁸ He had written and prerecorded all of its videos in advance, beginning immediately after finishing work on the character Sora for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; the final episode was uploaded on October 15, 2024.¹⁵ He returned to the Kirby series to direct Kirby Air Riders for the Nintendo Switch 2, his first Kirby direction since Kirby Air Ride.¹³¹⁷ In March 2025 he was awarded the AMD Award for Lifetime Achievement.¹⁵¹⁷ A manga biography, “Masahiro Sakurai: Making the World More Fun with Games,” was announced for release in Japan on November 18, 2025.²⁰

Sakurai has provided the voice of King Dedede in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and the Super Smash Bros. series.¹³¹⁵ He has been married to Michiko Sakurai, who has designed menus and interfaces for several of his games, since June 2008.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶