A manga based on the life of Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai is out next month
The 160-page biographical comic looks at the Kirby creator’s career
A manga book based on the life of Masahiro Sakurai is set to be released next month in Japan.
The book’s title roughly translates as Masahiro Sakurai: Making the World More Fun with Games, and promises to tell “the behind-the-scenes story of the birth of games that entertained the world, Kirby and Smash Bros”.
As reported by Famitsu, the book’s six chapters are as follows:
- Young Sakurai and Games
- The Birth of Kirby
- The Beginning of Super Smash Bros
- The Founding of Sora, Inc
- The Legacy
- A Beacon for the Future
The book, which was supervised by Sakurai himself, will also include various other written sections about Sakurai and the games industry, including a timeline of Sakurai’s life and an article about working as a game developer.
The 160-page book will be released in Japan on November 18 at a price of ¥1,430 ($9.45). There are currently no known plans for an official English translation.
After a period of semi-retirement, Sakurai returned to game development to direct Kirby Air Riders, which will be released on Switch 2 on November 20, two days after the book’s release.
Sakurai was recently awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Association of Media in Digital (AMD) awards in Japan, and was also a recipient of the Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists, given by the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
The latter award is “presented to persons whose outstanding achievements have opened up new vistas in a given year”, and was presented to Sakurai for his YouTube channel, rather than his 35+ years as a game designer.
During his acceptance speech for the AMD award, Sakurai noted that while his knowledge and expertise could be considered valuable enough to sell, he instead willingly shared a wealth of game design lessons and advice on his YouTube channel, without even monetising the videos.
“I did something extremely irrational on my channel – I disseminated all of my knowledge as a game director to the whole world for free. Why did I do that?” Sakurai asked during his speech. “I feel like I’m losing to a lot of professions out there. While I am making my own contributions, I can’t even hope to compete with what doctors do, for instance.”
He then added: “In the end, without peace and health, people cannot enjoy digital entertainment – this is something I’m conscious of. But the digital media we create has the potential to ‘buff’ peoples’ lives, making it an extremely rewarding profession.”
Sakurai concluded that with this in mind, he decided to share his knowledge for free in the hope that other developers may learn something, and use his advice to “do their best” to make more games that people enjoy.
