Masahiro Sakurai launches YouTube channel about game design
Masahiro Sakurai, best known as the creator of Kirby and director of the Super Smash Bros. series, has launched a new YouTube channel about game design, offering tips and insights with the aim of helping to "make games around the world a little more fun." He clarifies that while the channel is intended to be accessible to everyone, he will not be streaming games or speaking off-the-cuff; these will be pointed video essays about "topics like game development and what makes games fun." Similarly, technical talk will be kept to a minimum, with the discussion centering more around game design theory.
Each video will be "bite-sized," ranging from two to five minutes, and will be uploaded in both Japanese and English. Sakurai notes that YouTube's duplicate content algorithm may delete one version of the other, but pledges to "keep an eye on it." On the topic of game footage, he plans to mostly use "the classics" to avoid potential copyright issues, and has also been granted permission to show off design documents and development builds from the Smash Bros. series. However, Nintendo is not involved in the development of the project, and Sakurai is paying out of pocket for video editors and translators. Despite this, he promises not to run ads or monetize the channel.
The series could be seen as a successor to Sakurai's "Think About Video Games" series, a weekly column that ran in Famitsu from 2002-2021.
The channel has just launched today, and already has three videos up. There's two introductory videos, one explaining Sakurai's goals with the channel and another giving an overview of his career. The third video is his first proper video essay, discussing the importance of hit stops: a brief pause in a game's action upon a significant moment, to help the player feel its impact and register what happened. Sakurai breaks down not only why hit stops are important, but their history, what types of developers tend to use them, and what genres could benefit from them.
You can check out "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games" here.