Masahiro Sakurai Reveals Original Kirby Design Docs and Secret Details in Latest Video
Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has revealed the original design documents for Kirby and other secrets of Kirby’s Dream Land for the Game Boy in his 100th episode of “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games” on YouTube. In the video, Sakurai shared how he came up with the concept for Kirby’s Dream Land around May 1990 at the age of 19 and made the game simple enough to invite people who are new to video games and showing them how fun they can be.
Sakurai revealed how he worked around the strict memory limitations the small game presented and designed Kirby’s Dream Land to meet the ROM size of 512 kilobits but it was released in 2 megabits. He designed the characters to make them fit while retaining their true size, creating Waddle Dee and Waddle Doo by reusing the back half of one of them, and stuck three dots on a tree in one of the backgrounds to create the boss Whispy Woods. Despite the limitations that came about during the making of Kirby’s Dream Land, the game went on to sell five million copies worldwide, topping the Game Boy’s best-sellers charts for several months straight.
The video also demonstrated how multipurpose the Twin Famicom was, as it allowed Sakurai and his fellow developers to draw the pixel art, combine the art to create the characters, conducted animation tests for them, and even create the backgrounds and title screen. Although the documents aren’t new, Sakurai decided to give the same secret dev presentation in a way that is new to Kirby fans outside of Japan.
Kirby has come a long way from side-scrolling to open-world games with the recent release of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which was made without Sakurai’s involvement. He hasn’t developed a Kirby game since Kirby and the Amazing Mirror in 2004, as he was focused on the Super Smash Bros. series. Nonetheless, fans of the iconic pink puffball will enjoy Sakurai’s insightful presentation on Kirby’s early development and the secrets behind the making of the classic Game Boy game.
