At its E3 2011 press conference, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced that the company’s new Wii U console would have a brand new Super Smash Bros. title. According to series creator Masahiro Sakurai however, his studio has been so busy with Kid Icarus: Uprising that it hasn’t even started thinking about the next Smash Bros. game.
"Right now, we’re devoting all our manpower to working on Kid Icarus," Sakurai said in his Famitsu magazine column. "We’ve got no plans whatsoever — we’ve got two new games out in the open when there’s no extra time to work with them at all. It makes me cringe, and I’m not sure it’s the smartest thing to make gamers wait for several years, but the early announcement was made chiefly in order to attract new team members."
The studio, Project Sora, was looking to use Uprising as a means to get used to the handheld’s technology before making a Smash Bros. title for the device. Then Iwata let the team know about the Wii U, and Project Sora was left with a choice that those who saw the E3 press conference already know the result of.
"Project Sora had intended to make a 3DS Smash Bros. once it had finished up a game on the system and had gotten used to the hardware’s feature set," Sakurai wrote. "With the advent of the Wii U, though, we had a choice to make. Iwata asked us if wanted to make the next Smash Bros. on the Wii U or 3DS, and my thought was that we had to go on both platforms."
He then explained that the reason for picking both platforms was to prevent a limitation of the series. Making another console title would prevent them from expanding the series’ gameplay possibilities that were available with the 3DS, but an experimental portable release could end in failure and seriously damage the franchise’s credibility. Thus not only is the studio making both, but trying to figure out how to connect the two, as Iwata announced back at E3.
As of right now, Sakurai is scrambling to build up his development team for the new Smash Bros. But since Project Sora hasn’t even conceptualized the game yet, he is a bit burdened by the task.
"The hardest part about game development is the burdens it places upon me," he said. "With previous projects I had a game design document in place before forming a team, but with this I don’t have the time for that. I won’t be able to look at every aspect of the game and balance out all the characters by myself this time.
"I’m trying to think about how this is going to work out, but probably I’ll have to discuss it with my future development team. The future of this project really depends on the people I can get involved with it."
[1UP]
