Super Smash Bros. creator started production on his next game in 2022

The creator of the Super Smash Bros. and Kirby series started production on his next game project in 2022.

Masahiro Sakurai teased the project in the final episode of his YouTube series ‘Creating Games’, which was published on Tuesday and is viewable below.

“It was around July of 2021,” he said. “I was busy working on the DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. To be precise, I was putting together the video for ‘Mr. Sakurai Presents: Kazuya’. Sora was in development too, of course. Oh, and by Sora, I mean the fighter. Not that company you may have heard of.

“While I was busy working on those tasks, I received a request to write a game proposal, which I finished at lightning speed. I’m sorry I can’t share more about this project, but assuming we’re able to get it made, it should be announced sooner or later.

“Then, in late October of 2021… Sora was released, and my work commitments were more or less wrapped up,” he continued. “There was, of course, that new game proposal I had written. I’d been given the OK to move forward with production, but it was going to take some time to assemble the right team. The target timeframe was April 2022. Until then, I would have to wait.”

With this gap in his schedule, Sakurai decided to create his YouTube channel.

“How can I pass on the knowledge I’ve learned over the years to as many people as possible? I thought about that for a long time,” he said. “In the end, I decided to make this channel – a lasting archive of information for people to access whenever they like.”

Sakurai said he ended up planning the entire run of the YouTube channel in the months before production started on his next game, scripting all 260 episodes excluding today’s finale.

“In other words, the final count and content of the all these videos was already decided from the very beginning of the channel. It was all planned out from start to finish. Theat’s how I could tell you the channel would wrap up sometime this year, and how all the footage prior to this video was recorded over two and a half years ago.”

“[By August 2022, when the channel launched] the game project I’ve mentioned had already started production, so as I’d prepared for, I had to work on both ventures at once,” he added.

Sakurai said a typical day would see him getting up at 8am and basically working on his game development project until 6.30pm. He’d then break for dinner before starting work on his YouTube channel at 8pm. He’d try to finish this before midnight, giving him some time to play games or exercise before heading to bed between 1am and 2am.