1/22 Itawa asks*

[SuperLuigiGalaxy]

There’s a web page nestled within Nintendo’s official site where Mr. Iwata, President of Nintendo Co. Ltd., interviews other Nintendo employees. This corner of the website is known as "Iwata Asks."

For some reason, I, Masahiro Sakurai, was invited to one of these interviews.

Wha--?

But I’m not a Nintendo employee! I-is this OK? Are we seriously doing this? Oh, is that so? All right, well, if you insist!

I imagine this interview should give you a tiny glimpse behind the curtains to see what creating Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been like.

Go on and click the link below to check it out!

http://us.wii.com/

[SuperLuigiGalaxy]

Introduction
Iwata: Hello, Everyone. My name is Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd. Beginning today, I would like to deliver an interview that explains the vision and the development process behind the creation of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But before we begin, I would like to offer an apology. With the completion of the game falling behind schedule, we were unable to keep our promised release date, despite our greatest efforts in attempting to release this game on time. I would like to extend my most sincere apology to all of our customers that are anticipating the title’s release, and also to our retailers. I have asked Mr. Nagata from "Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun" (a webpage hosted by famed copywriter Shigesato Itoi), who is a fan of Smash Bros. himself, to take on the role as the editor for this Iwata Asks interview. The last time he helped us was with the Iwata Asks series before the Wii launch, but I feel like I have asked the perfect candidate to convey the appeal of Smash Bros. I hope you enjoy this interview.



Iwata:  Asks His Former Employee E3 2005: A Beginning Searching for Office and Staff Betting on Success Iwata Asks His Former Employee
Sakurai: So this is for the "Iwata Asks" interviews, right?


Iwata: That’s right.

Sakurai: In other words, this is where you, the president of Nintendo, interview the developers working for Nintendo.


Iwata: Yes.


Sakurai: Is it okay for me to be here since I’m not a Nintendo employee?


Iwata: Of course, you’re my former employee, after all.


Sakurai: That’s right! (laughs) So it’s the "Iwata Asks His Former Employee Interview," then.

Iwata: Actually, maybe I should first explain how I came to be your former boss.


Sakurai: That sounds like a good idea.


Iwata :Of course. (laughs) So Sakurai-kun₁ — and I use this form of address purposefully, since I was your first boss after you came to HAL Laboratory and started working in the gaming industry — remind me how old were you at that time?
1. Similar to "San" as in "Iwata-san", "Kun" is an informal honorific primarily, generally used towards males. It is used by persons of senior status in addressing those of junior status.

Sakurai: Nineteen years old.


Iwata: Wow, just nineteen!?


Sakurai: Right. Still young and full of energy. (laughs)



Iwata: So, you and I, the two of us, took on an assignment to develop the prototype for the original Super Smash Bros. for N64, and since I had worked as president of HAL Laboratory before becoming president at Nintendo…


Sakurai: …it’s the "Iwata Asks His Former Employee Interview."


Iwata: Right. Let’s get started then.


Sakurai: Okay.

[SuperLuigiGalaxy]

E3 2005: A Beginning
Iwata: First off, why don’t we talk about how the Smash Bros. Brawl got started? I believe it was at E3, right?


Sakurai: That’s right.

Iwata: E3 is an international gaming event and I myself was at the E3 in May of 2005 to give a presentation about the Wii. At the time, the Wii was still being referred to by its code name "Revolution" and Nintendo revealed the exterior design of this new gaming console as well as the fact that it would include Wi-Fi support. Before the presentation, we polled a large number of people on what Nintendo titles they hoped to see made available for network play and many put Smash Bros. at the top of their list. All the employees from Nintendo of America that were involved with E3 at the time strongly wanted to announce a new Super Smash Bros. that would be compatible with Wi-Fi play. But at the time, we still hadn’t discuss this thoroughly with HAL Laboratory yet, which shared the rights to Smash Bros. with Nintendo, and we hadn’t even begun planning out the production process. So I have announced this subject, emphasizing that I was hoping that a Smash Bros. game would be released as a Wi-Fi compatible title. However, most people from Japan that were in the conference room took this as an official announcement that Nintendo was going to release a new Smash Bros. Looking back at it now, I do regret the way I said this; you can’t blame them for interpreting it that way…Naturally, it was a splash of cold water for you.


Sakurai: Absolutely. (laughs) You can imagine my surprise when I was told by the others at the E3 show site that you made the announcement out of the blue.


Iwata: I even heard that the people around you at E3 were asking you whether or not you would develop the Smash Bros. game.


Sakurai: Yeah, it was rough. (laughs) I had no idea what to say.


Iwata: So, during that E3, I invited you to my hotel room and told you what I was hoping to do. That was the start of the project…there wasn’t any specifications set, nor were there any framework.

Sakurai: And the fact that I had already quit HAL Laboratory made the things a bit complicated…


Iwata: Well, I had considered what I would do if you turned me down and decided that I would need to take the existing Smash Bros. title, Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube, and try to make it Wi-Fi capable while preserving as much balanced game play as possible in the event you didn’t want to get involved. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that I realized we wouldn’t be able to add any new elements to the game without your help and I think I said as much when we discussed it at the hotel. It wasn’t right, but you might even say I used it as a threat of sorts.


Sakurai: It certainly had the desired impact!


Iwata: (laughs)



Sakurai: Actually, I was a freelance game developer at the time and had planned to use the E3 as a means to gather information on the newest hardware and software and figure out what I would work on next. And then I met up with you. I had some other job requests already and had a hard time making up my mind. In the end though, I decided there were no other jobs with the potential that I could get people to be as happy as the Smash Bros. project. After all, it was already clear that lots of people were looking forward to it. So, I decided to accept the project. Or, accepted that I had no choice but to take it.


Iwata: For which I’m thankful. Even so, we weren’t ready for development.


Sakurai: Right. We didn’t have any staff as I was working freelance. I don’t think you could have made things harder for ourselves if you tried. (laughs)


Iwata: (laughs)

[SuperLuigiGalaxy]

Searching for Office and Staff
Iwata: So that’s how it all started. And at the time, the former Smash Bros. team at HAL Laboratory had their hands full with another project. But it was starting the project in this way, however, that enabled us to make the Smash Bros. Brawl development team something like no other.


Sakurai: That’s right. There were suggestions to house the project at Nintendo in Kyoto, but after talking through some ideas, we determined that it was necessary to do the project in Tokyo and we rented an office in Takadanobaba specifically for this game. I even moved to Takadanobaba.

Iwata: For the project, right?


Sakurai: Right, for the project. I mean, if you want to make a new Smash Bros., you have to be ready to put everything else on hold if you want to make it work.


Iwata: Marriage of home and the work place.


Sakurai: Right. Then, just when we were looking for some help, we secured some staff from another video game developer.


Iwata: We were introduced to this company by Miyamoto-san. You can share the name if you like.

Sakurai: Oh, okay. It was Game Arts. It was just after they had finished Grandia III and they told us that they had some staff free. So, we decided to leave the main part of preliminary development to them while we began to hire remaining staff. We did so by looking for people specifically for the Smash Bros. Brawl title.


Iwata: I think it’s quite unique to conduct hiring specifically for one game. After all, it’s clear when we say that "we are seeking help for this project," but then there was no guarantee of employment once the project was finished.


Sakurai: Even so, I think people who work together at these occasions tend to form the right connections and that, including myself, several of our staff will probably work with each other sometime in the future. The reason I myself became a freelancer is out of the limitation I felt from working endlessly with the same people on the same series.



Iwata: Also, special projects like this often give rise to a special level of trust, sometimes creating a deep and lasting camaraderie.


Sakurai: Right. I think it’s possible for good things to happen when you bring in outside staff or outsource some work. In fact, the staff members we pulled together for this project, including everyone from Game Arts, were all highly-skilled individuals.


Iwata: How many staff members did you end up having for this project?


Sakurai: Roughly 100 individuals. Of course, there would be even more if you count supervisors and contractors. Looking at all the staff that appears in the staff credits, it was about 700 people.


Iwata: So the number of people involved fulltime was roughly 100.


Sakurai: That’s right.

[SuperLuigiGalaxy]

Betting on Success
Iwata: Despite the abilities of your staff, didn’t it take a lot of energy to make sure everyone was on the same page? After all, everyone had worked under very different conditions before being called together suddenly, solely for the development of the next Smash Bros.


Sakurai: I’m not sure everyone was fully on the same page, but they’re all grown ups! (laughs) And if there is one thing you can say about the people we assembled for the project, it’s that they had a clear desire to work on the next Smash Bros title. I think this saved us from encountering problems.

Iwata: So you didn’t have anyone saying "But I don’t want to work on Smash Bros!"


Sakurai: Right. (laughs) Everyone was pretty reasonable in that sense.


Iwata: You know, these aren’t the type of procedures I would employ for just any game. I mean, if this was a regular game, I would never work this way.


Sakura: iRight.


Iwata: My decision to pursue the project in this way rested on one point and one point alone, and it is deeply tied to the point about which I have the utmost faith in a man named Masahiro Sakurai. To state it simply, you are capable of taking a project with nothing and visualizing a completed game almost perfectly in your head. As I mentioned earlier, you and I have a long history working together at HAL Laboratory. When involved on the same project, you were able to point out the smallest details even when the product had yet to take shape. The details were so small and so specific that, as a programmer, I thought there was no way you could know what you knew without actually trying it first. As the game progressed and took shape, however, it was clear that we needed to address the details in just the way you had described. So I would ask "did you really know this right from the start?" I mean, this was over ten years ago, but I remember you said you did and I thought to myself "is this guy for real?" As it happened over and over again, however, I had little choice but to believe you. I don’t know how, but you’re able to visualize a game right down to its very details, as if the finished game is working inside your mind. If not, how else could you have been right so many times? Even now, Masahiro Sakurai, of all the people that I know, you especially can readily form an image of how a game will look when finished. That’s why I knew that you would be capable of putting together the ideas of the talented staff around you. If you don’t have a person like that pulling together different ideas, you need a lot of trust within the team or the project will not go anywhere. When a project has just begun, it’s natural for directions to come from a vague concept of the product. It’s natural for there to be revisions and twists and turns, and as this continues, the project becomes something different than it was at the start. This is not necessarily a bad thing and happens all the time when designing games. However, this only works because of the trust built up from the past of a long working relationship. That’s why it was so unusual to recruit outside staff solely for the purpose of making such a large-scale game. Yet it was exactly this type of thinking on which I was betting our success.



Sakurai: Wow…uh, thanks for the words of praise. (laughs)


Iwata: Well, it’s not just a compliment. I realized I made a decision that would place a heck of a lot of pressure on you. (laughs)


Sakurai: In actuality, it did. I’d like to take a moment to explain something since it might not be readily apparent to our customers, but making something is often thought of in terms of following a series of steps from start to finish. In reality though, it’s quite different and there are several places at which you can go astray when designing a game.


Iwata: There are many circumstances in which you can’t envision how another person will feel about something until you’ve tried making it yourself. For this reason, there are many cases, unfortunately, in which you make something that seems theoretically right but ends up being a mess. At least in my experience that is.


Sakurai: And, if you’re wondering whether I’m capable of producing a final product exactly the same as the one I envision in my mind, well the answer is a definite no. Of course there are things that never made it in the game.


Iwata: I think it was your unprecedented development strategies that enabled Smash Bros. Brawl to take its shape.


Sakurai: (laughs)


Iwata: Of course, it must have taken a lot of hard work to get there.


Sakurai: Yeah, you got me there.


Iwata: Actually, this brings me to the next part of our interview. Can you tell me about the things that first came to mind when you thought about developing a new Smash Bros. game?


(To be continued)

[Simpsfan]

Thanks for all of this, but I want to say that I think that this came out bc of the delays.

[dcmjlive]

Not really, it's pretty much standard procedure for highly projected sales games. They made 1 for SMG as well.

[CHaDOS]

Any word on when volume 2 of the interview  is coming out?! I CAN'T STANDS THE DELAAAAY!!!!! Gaaaaaaaaaaah!


 

[Darkmatter]

Wow...Its pretty long...Ill read it later today when I have time.

[The-Forgotten-One]

I found it half boring...but that's just me...

[specs]

It sounds like Iwata-san did most of the talking (laughs).
His praise seemed almost superficial.

I mean, he practically repeated the fact the Sakurai knows how to envision all the details in a game with great skill about four times (laughs).

The atmosphere created by a boss and his former employee was a bit awkward at times, especially when Sakurai was asked about his past at HAL Laboratory (laughs).

Well, at least I found a way to express laughter similar to DJ's trademarked "HAHA."
Expect to see (laughs) as the new evolution of 

[dcmjlive]

Yeah, fine...my haha is trademarked now. I think I need to get a patent of it. Anyways, I actually enjoyed the article. It actually brings you to the world of making the game and you realize the circumstances it had to go through. One, this was the time when Sakurai had just quit HAL and has no staff. Iwata makes the mistake of confirming a new Smash Bros. He then wants Sakurai to do it but he has no staff. So Iwata pulls strings to get Sakurai some staff. It was a risky shot as they were making the potentially most potent and famous game to ever live. But I have to say, even with a staff that only worked on one game, I'm impressed. I hope to read the continuation soon.

[Sniper870]

so when's part 2 coming 

[Totter]

Wow...think of the game we would be playing if Sakurai hadn't agreed to make Brawl 

[dcmjlive]

Wow...think of the game we would be playing if Sakurai hadn't agreed to make Brawl 

It'll definitely suck! HAHA! GO SAKURAI!!!