Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Director Masahiro Sakurai has consistently worked on the series for 9 years of his life, but his professional work might be done now.
Super Smash Bros. series had received multiple games on the Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, and finally on the Nintendo Switch. Each of these games went on to sell millions of copies and all of them were critically acclaimed. This is not an easy feat at all, but Sakurai was able to deliver consistently on the project.
In a new interview, Sakurai confirms that the work he had done on the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate series had taken its toll on him and he thinks it is time to semi-retire from game development. He mentions how he is 52 years old now.
After all, while developing “Smash Bros.”, I realized that I had very little time left.
I started working on “Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS/Wii U” and “Smash Bros. Ultimate” as soon as I finished developing “Kid Icarus Uprising” in 2012, and finished making the DLC for “Smash Bros. Ultimate” in 2021, so that’s roughly 9 years.
I don’t know how long my life is going to be, but I sometimes thought that if I were to be serious about making games, my life would be over in the blink of an eye. That’s how long it takes to make games nowadays.
I think that the “Smash Bros.” job is very important because it allows me to deliver games to a wide range of people of all ages, and I am in charge of a wide variety of characters and content in the game industry, and I am very grateful to be able to do that job.
But if I keep doing the same thing, I will retire in no time, and even if I were to take it easy and think, “I’ll start making programs when I turn 55,” I may not be able to do that for one reason or another by then.
Sakurai mentioned that this is the reason why he started to do his YouTube channel because this is something that he had planned for a while.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate received two season passes after it launched back in 2018. The game has sold a cumulative number of 29.53 million copies. It is the top 3 best-selling games on the Nintendo Switch, only behind Animal Crossing New Horizons and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.