One of the most anticipated speakers at this year's GDC was easily Sora's Masahiro Sakurai, the man behind Nintendo's insanely popular fighting game series, Super Smash Bros. With the latest iteration of the game already released in Japan (it sold over one million copies in seven days) and the U.S. and European release dates rapidly approaching, Super Smash Bros. Brawl has success written all over it. Today's session saw Sakurai concentrate on the game's impressive roster of famous videogame characters and some of the processes behind selection and implementation.
The session kicked off with the game's introduction movie which was well received by the audience. Sakurai talked of the upcoming US launch date for SSBB which was recently pushed back a few weeks to March 9th. Sakurai's company, Sora Ltd., actually only has two employees; himself and his personal assistant. Of course, being an important first-party Nintendo title meant that a talented team from within Nintendo was assembled in order to tackle the SSBB project.
Nintendo rented office space in Tokyo and brought in people from Game Arts (probably best known for the Grandia series) as well as contracted staff through Nintendo. At its peak there were around 100 employees on the team.
Developing the Character Roster
The focus of the session was to talk about the character design of SSBB so Sakurai was eager to point out that in terms of character selection, the project was blessed with being able utilize characters from many other famous games. The lineup of characters was almost completely finalized in the initial planning stages which began in 2004. The team developed an oversized plan and created as much as they could, but there were always exceptions and Sega's Sonic was not part of the roster until 2007.
It was noted that the characters had to stand out and have unique move sets of their own. There needed to be a good balance of characters and even some of Nintendo's own characters could not appear due to licensing issues. Sakurai stated that in order to make the most of a character he was required to think long and hard early on in the design process as to what that specific character brought to the table.
