Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo
The Smash Bros director says waiting time should be kept to a minimum when games boot
Kirby creator and Smash Bros series director Masahiro Sakurai has revealed that he once chose to remove Dolby Surround from a game because the logo added extra waiting time for the player.
Sakurai and former Platinum Games co-founder Hideki Kamiya took part in a livestream over the weekend to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Arcade Archives series of retro games, released by Hamster Corporation.
During the discussion, Sakurai said that his one recommendation for Hamster was that it should reduce the waiting time between launching one of its Arcade Archives titles and actually starting the arcade game it features.
“When you’re at the arcade, you swiftly jump from one machine to another, switching between various games,” he said (as translated by Automaton). “But why is it that you don’t get the same impulse with Archive Arcade games despite there being many games to choose from?
“Rather than just tossing in a coin and getting into the game immediately, you must click an icon, wait for the logo, wait for the title, look at the instructions screen, wait until everything loads, and then you’re finally at the main screen, after which you can start playing.
“I want you to measure the total time this takes and shorten it by even one second.”
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To prove that he was serious about this, Sakurai then revealed that GameCube racing game Kirby Air Ride was originally supposed to have Dolby Surround audio, but Sakurai chose to ditch it because it would have meant showing the Dolby logo at the start of the game for a few seconds.
“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.”
Earlier this year, Sakurai said he was “still creating games for the time being”, despite previously claiming in 2022 that he was “semi-retired” following the release of Super Smash Bros Ultimate’s final DLC character.
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