From the latest famitsu column, Sakurai brings us his work from home setup:
View attachment 270597
That monitor looks kinda familiar...
I spoke about this at length on Discord but I figure I should bring some of it up here in this happy little thread. I'll probably catch a lot of hell for suggesting that there's anything useful in this picture, but really, I think there is. To quote myself from Discord earlier, what if the monitor here is actually basically a rental from work? Like, if you're working on a development build of a game, you need to know that the framerate is stable and stuff like that, so you need a quality monitor with a high refresh rate - the kind that can end up running like two hundred dollars. Not everyone who works on games is necessarily expected to have that kind of monitor at home, I wouldn't think.
So for instance, here in my office, we use the same monitors on every PC - it's just kind of what we buy. It wouldn't surprise me if the folks working on Smash from home were allowed to bring their whole work PC home with them - it may take a beefy machine to run software for working on the game, and they more than likely have important files there, too. If there was some way to really start to prove that this monitor and the cacomallow monitor are the same, we might really be onto something.
Another thing worth noting is that the timer is cropped out. The picture is definitely supposed to be focusing on that microphone, since it goes along with what Sakurai was talking about in the column, but there's little doubt in my mind that the picture was cropped very purposefully. Imagine if Sakurai had accidentally left the timer in with 2:30 proudly sitting up there.
Also, Banjo is 4P, you have to wonder who 1P is in this picture, huh? Banjo is definitely on the middle of the top platform on Battlefield... Maybe Big Battlefield, and whoever is below him with what seems to be a fixed camera, is only tall enough to have that much of the 1P sticking out above them. Wonder if it would be possible to recreate this scene with basically every character in the game and figure out who's too tall and who's too short for this to work? It'd either confirm who the character is, or if it's someone totally new, give us a height to expect from them. One has to wonder if it's the ARMS rep or someone after...