Meet The Video Game Developer: Masahiro Sakurai

When Masahiro Sakurai first joined HAL Laboratory, the company didn’t look like much at all. They’d made games for the Commodore, Coleco Vision, the MSX and the Famicom. None of those games ever hit big. HAL’s foray into making games for the newly-released Nintendo Entertainment System wasn’t faring too well either. The Adventures of Lolo trilogy went mostly unnoticed, as did Air Fortress and Day Dereamin’ Davey. Davey, however, was a fairly good game. HAL needed a hit and fast. It was then, at the age of 19, that Sakurai came up with a game character of his own. He presented the idea to the company, and HAL decided to go with it, but not before releasing Kabuki Quantum Fighter, another semi-gem that went unnoticed by the majority of the world.

By that point, HAL Laboratory needed a hit. They allowed Masahiro to create a game based on his character creation. Intending to make this his big break, Sakurai set out to create a game that would be both engaging for advanced players and simple enough for beginners to pick up and play. And so Twinkle Popo was born. An interesting fact is, of course, that the modern Popopo we know and love was actually just a stand-in until the designers could create a better character model. By end of its development cycle, the people behind the game were so in love with the guy, they decided to keep him. Of course, they first renamed him to Kirby, after the Kirby vacuum cleaner, and renamed the game to Kirby's Dreamland.

The success of Kirby's dreamland finally gained HAL Laboratory the hit they so sorely needed. Kirby needed to strike again, and quickly. And so, in 1993, Kirby's Adventure hit stores. It was largely applauded by both critics and fans, and is considered to feature some of the best graphics ever created on the NES. To this day, it remains one of the console's highlights and a huge fan favorite. It was also one of the last titles to come out for the NES. The Super Nintendo was well on its way, and the little pink blob that almost turned into an entirely different character would be more than happy to make the transition to next-gen hardware.    

At some point, an observant someone over at HAL Laboratory realized a very important thing: Kirby looks like a ball. That sudden revelation lead Sakurai to pen and then take the helm of two Kirby games that weren't platformers. First came Kirby's Pinball Land. Its plot was rather thin and flimsy, but it was a solid pinball game on the original Gameboy. People didn't hate it, praising its quality gameplay, but they were expecting a platformer, so the reviews weren't nearly as enthusiastic as they had been for Kirby's Adventure. That didn't stop HAL from releasing another ball-based Kirby game, called Kirby's Block Ball. Much like Pinball Land had been a pinball clone, Block Ball wasn't much more than Breakout with a Kirby skin. Again, however, it was solid and very well built, so no one complained.