When it comes to Masahiro Sakurai (whom we love on NEP!), you almost never know what to expect with him outside of his focused desire to make the best video games possible. He strives for perfection and fun equally, which is rare in game designers and developers these days. If you watch his YouTube Channel, you’ll see the little details that he fixates on to ensure that his personally-developed titles are as good as can be. The other day, he hung out with Hideki Kamiya and talked about game design while also sharing a unique historical insight into Kirby Air Ride.
He and Kamiya were doing a live stream for Arcade Archives, and Sakurai had some constructive criticisms about the titles despite loving them so much. Specifically, he noted that gamers have to go through multiple screens just to play the game. That’s something he doesn’t approve of.
How does this tie into Kirby Air Ride? Masahiro Sakurai revealed in that same video that the Nintendo Gamecube title was supposed to have Dolby surround sound within it. However, a requirement of using the company’s sound design was that the game needed to have the Dolby logo on the screen for a while. Sakurai nixed that immediately:
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “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.”
