This year, I attended Game Developer's Conference (GDC) '08 as a Conference Associate (CA) helping run the conference. I was able to attend and help run a certain session at 10:30 in N135, by a certain Masahiro Sakurai.
To say that I met him is perhaps a stretch, given that his English is token at best so I obviously didn't get to talk to him or even try. However, I did stand right in front of him and keep other people from trying to talk to him! (Including one really annoying guy with a Kirby doll...) Nintendo let press take pictures while he was setting up, and I might actually be in a lot of those photos by him if the shot is wide enough.
However, he did sign my controller, which makes it count.
They played the opening movie, and at the end Sakurai comically started singing the song before the speech. The speech was specifically on the characters in Brawl. I'm going to go through five major points that I feel are extremely applicable to everyone on the boards.
1. Sakurai is More Hardcore Than You
Playing one-handed is hard, playing with the right hand is even harder, and the hardest ask for two controllers.
Sakurai takes three.
I honestly don't think anyone else outside the other three decent smashers there even noticed or realized that during the live demo part, Sakurai was playing as Sonic, Snake, and Pit on Battlefield ALL BY HIMSELF. Some was slow, showing off one character at a time, but I was watching him before the speech doing much faster, crazier stuff with all three. He was playing the three GCN controllers (two silver, one black?) like a keyboard all lined up in a curve in front of him, it was wild.
2. The Game We Study, Sakurai Created
Masahiro Sakurai personally decides and programs every piece of frame data in the game.
If you are a competitive Smash player, your mind was just blown.
I cannot stress how important this is, how ridiculously crazy news this is: Sakurai himself and himself alone balances the entire game of Super Smash Bros. Every parameter of every move he poured over. He spent endless amounts of time testing and watching others, seeing how players worked with different timings on every attack. He practically devoted his life to this, working into the night analyzing and tweaking the parameters to be "perfect". He stressed to us game developers that not taking this sort of care dooms games to failure.
When he showed a chart of Fox's up-smash, showing the frames 0-44 and which ones hit, I think most of the crowd just saw it as a typical animation timeline. Samples from many other moves he showed I imagine they saw as just screenshots. We see them as the game itself. So does he.
It gives me a headache to even think: Every time I throw out a f-smash, it was Sakurai who spent time watching testers to decide exactly what the start-up, duration, and vulnerable frames should be, not some arbitrary number put in by some junior programmer that happens to work out. Every time I have to decide between a nair and a fair, it is Sakurai himself who stayed up at night deciding what the exact difference in duration and knockback should be. (I suspect l-canceling now was removed because he was able to decide on precise and unique lag times for every aerial in the game according to their balance, which certainly seems to be the case. The ability to half or otherwise reduce these carefully crafted times across the board would defeat the point.)
Smash is our life, but is his entire existence. Sakurai knows this game infinitely better than you or I ever will.
3. The COMPLETE Roster was Finalized in 2006
The exception, actually, was Sonic. Sonic was not in the original complete roster, and was only added later in 2007 because he was the most demanded character and they were able to work it out with SEGA. Since he was so important and wanted, they were able to put in a lot of extra work and get him in.
Everyone else was in the game, at least in some state of readiness, in 2006. The original design document, the bible laid out by the designer by which ANY game is planned, included figurines in poses of EVERY MOVE IN THE GAME. That is how much in advance everyone had to be laid out.
Warning: Keep in mind that I am extremely tired because I spent the last 5 days non-stop at lectures and tutorials about game design, especially the development process, timelines, and testing/QA. The first person who suggests that they could have easily added more characters "omg wtf they had over a year!??!" will be ignored; not because I don't want to reply, but because I was arrested after hunting you down and trying to stick a crowbar where your brain should be. Ignorance of the game design process and the amount of people, money, and time it takes to work on games will simply not be tolerated. (Man, the amount of work the art team did on the models, textures, and animations for Pit alone was just crazy, he talked about it...)
4. The Dojo Was More Than We Deserved
Not much to say here besides that he emphasized how much work it was to maintain, even though he also emphasized that it was worth it. He personally did indeed write EVERYTHING, but mainly emphasized that the staff had to go way out of their way to get special shots for everything, not to mention make the videos. He said on busy days it was referred to as sending team members to "Dojo Update Hell".
And we just had to press F5!
5. "No Matter How Many Times People Hear Something, They Will Not Believe It Until They See It."
He said this towards the end in closing, connecting with why the Dojo was worth it. I suddenly had all these simultaneous images in my head: Me and my friends long ago wondering if smash 64 would be any good, noobs insisting they can beat pros, pessimists yelling brawl will never be played competitively. I had this sudden realization that there are simply times when it is literally impossible to make an argument, because no argument can possibly do anything.
All you can do is wait for them to live their life to a point at which they are brought to whatever truth it is, as you have. That, is what I learned from Masahiro Sakurai.
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Bonus: My recollection of Sakurai had 4 criteria that all characters must observe in order to be considered for being added:
1. The character's inclusion must make people want to play the game.
This is infinitely harder than you and I think, because we are so jaded by our own perspective. I would insist that Viewtiful Joe would be the best character ever, but I'm not sure people would really want the game more. Neither of us would have ever thought of ROB, and yet "ROBOT" was the CROWD FAVORITE by FAR in the GDC matches the CAs had. Everyone loved him! We as gamers are way too biased to make this decision easily.
2. The character must be unique.
The character must have identifying features and abilities that would make them different from existing characters, so that they add something to the game.
3. The character must fit into the style of Super Smash Bros.
The character obviously has to be able to fit into the framework of how smash works, obviously Pac-Man and L Block would not work. (My examples, not his.)
4. They must contribute to the game balance.
Everyone has to fit together. Every new character must counter some characters and be countered by others, and they must fit in one giant contiguous mesh.
----------
To say that I met him is perhaps a stretch, given that his English is token at best so I obviously didn't get to talk to him or even try. However, I did stand right in front of him and keep other people from trying to talk to him! (Including one really annoying guy with a Kirby doll...) Nintendo let press take pictures while he was setting up, and I might actually be in a lot of those photos by him if the shot is wide enough.
However, he did sign my controller, which makes it count.
They played the opening movie, and at the end Sakurai comically started singing the song before the speech. The speech was specifically on the characters in Brawl. I'm going to go through five major points that I feel are extremely applicable to everyone on the boards.
1. Sakurai is More Hardcore Than You
Playing one-handed is hard, playing with the right hand is even harder, and the hardest ask for two controllers.
Sakurai takes three.
I honestly don't think anyone else outside the other three decent smashers there even noticed or realized that during the live demo part, Sakurai was playing as Sonic, Snake, and Pit on Battlefield ALL BY HIMSELF. Some was slow, showing off one character at a time, but I was watching him before the speech doing much faster, crazier stuff with all three. He was playing the three GCN controllers (two silver, one black?) like a keyboard all lined up in a curve in front of him, it was wild.
2. The Game We Study, Sakurai Created
Masahiro Sakurai personally decides and programs every piece of frame data in the game.
If you are a competitive Smash player, your mind was just blown.
I cannot stress how important this is, how ridiculously crazy news this is: Sakurai himself and himself alone balances the entire game of Super Smash Bros. Every parameter of every move he poured over. He spent endless amounts of time testing and watching others, seeing how players worked with different timings on every attack. He practically devoted his life to this, working into the night analyzing and tweaking the parameters to be "perfect". He stressed to us game developers that not taking this sort of care dooms games to failure.
When he showed a chart of Fox's up-smash, showing the frames 0-44 and which ones hit, I think most of the crowd just saw it as a typical animation timeline. Samples from many other moves he showed I imagine they saw as just screenshots. We see them as the game itself. So does he.
It gives me a headache to even think: Every time I throw out a f-smash, it was Sakurai who spent time watching testers to decide exactly what the start-up, duration, and vulnerable frames should be, not some arbitrary number put in by some junior programmer that happens to work out. Every time I have to decide between a nair and a fair, it is Sakurai himself who stayed up at night deciding what the exact difference in duration and knockback should be. (I suspect l-canceling now was removed because he was able to decide on precise and unique lag times for every aerial in the game according to their balance, which certainly seems to be the case. The ability to half or otherwise reduce these carefully crafted times across the board would defeat the point.)
Smash is our life, but is his entire existence. Sakurai knows this game infinitely better than you or I ever will.
3. The COMPLETE Roster was Finalized in 2006
The exception, actually, was Sonic. Sonic was not in the original complete roster, and was only added later in 2007 because he was the most demanded character and they were able to work it out with SEGA. Since he was so important and wanted, they were able to put in a lot of extra work and get him in.
Everyone else was in the game, at least in some state of readiness, in 2006. The original design document, the bible laid out by the designer by which ANY game is planned, included figurines in poses of EVERY MOVE IN THE GAME. That is how much in advance everyone had to be laid out.
Warning: Keep in mind that I am extremely tired because I spent the last 5 days non-stop at lectures and tutorials about game design, especially the development process, timelines, and testing/QA. The first person who suggests that they could have easily added more characters "omg wtf they had over a year!??!" will be ignored; not because I don't want to reply, but because I was arrested after hunting you down and trying to stick a crowbar where your brain should be. Ignorance of the game design process and the amount of people, money, and time it takes to work on games will simply not be tolerated. (Man, the amount of work the art team did on the models, textures, and animations for Pit alone was just crazy, he talked about it...)
4. The Dojo Was More Than We Deserved
Not much to say here besides that he emphasized how much work it was to maintain, even though he also emphasized that it was worth it. He personally did indeed write EVERYTHING, but mainly emphasized that the staff had to go way out of their way to get special shots for everything, not to mention make the videos. He said on busy days it was referred to as sending team members to "Dojo Update Hell".
And we just had to press F5!
5. "No Matter How Many Times People Hear Something, They Will Not Believe It Until They See It."
He said this towards the end in closing, connecting with why the Dojo was worth it. I suddenly had all these simultaneous images in my head: Me and my friends long ago wondering if smash 64 would be any good, noobs insisting they can beat pros, pessimists yelling brawl will never be played competitively. I had this sudden realization that there are simply times when it is literally impossible to make an argument, because no argument can possibly do anything.
All you can do is wait for them to live their life to a point at which they are brought to whatever truth it is, as you have. That, is what I learned from Masahiro Sakurai.
----------
Bonus: My recollection of Sakurai had 4 criteria that all characters must observe in order to be considered for being added:
1. The character's inclusion must make people want to play the game.
This is infinitely harder than you and I think, because we are so jaded by our own perspective. I would insist that Viewtiful Joe would be the best character ever, but I'm not sure people would really want the game more. Neither of us would have ever thought of ROB, and yet "ROBOT" was the CROWD FAVORITE by FAR in the GDC matches the CAs had. Everyone loved him! We as gamers are way too biased to make this decision easily.
2. The character must be unique.
The character must have identifying features and abilities that would make them different from existing characters, so that they add something to the game.
3. The character must fit into the style of Super Smash Bros.
The character obviously has to be able to fit into the framework of how smash works, obviously Pac-Man and L Block would not work. (My examples, not his.)
4. They must contribute to the game balance.
Everyone has to fit together. Every new character must counter some characters and be countered by others, and they must fit in one giant contiguous mesh.
----------
