Sakurai on the origins of Kid Icarus: Uprising (part 2)

– Sakurai was trying to figure out what sort of game he should make in 2008
– Sakurai believed that a lot of ports would be made, and didn’t think Iwata would want something that’s already been seen, is small, or is something like Wii Party
– Ultimately he decided to go with a difficult genre and something he wouldn’t usually do
– He chose the shooter genre, which isn’t very popular in Japan
– Made his decision because he felt it would be a good match for the 3D graphics
– Sakurai quickly made a basic design
– Project plan formally announced in 2008 after talking with Nintendo and interviewing potential studio members numerous times
– At this point it wasn’t Kid Icarus, just an original franchise
– Sakurai had asked Iwata in his first conversation if he should stick with a Nintendo franchise, Iwata told him that they should think about it if his project would be a good fit for one of the company’s franchises
– After that, Sakurai revised his project plan, and Kid Icarus came to mind since it’s popular in the West
– Initially was presented as an original game, but later Sakurai suggested to make it Kid Icarus
– As work on the game started, Sakurai rented a small office space in the Takadanobaba district of Tokyo in November 2008
– Only had a few staff members
– No development tools at the start since the 3DS was brand new
– Sakurai wanted to settle on their direction so that things could go smoothly when the staff moved to a bigger office
– He finalized Uprising’s project plan and wrote the story in the first office
– Project Sora started recruiting staff in March 2009

Quotes from Sakurai:

“Most of the games due to come out during the launch window were probably going to be ports. I could have chosen a genre that was easy to develop, but I doubted Iwata wanted something everyone’s seen before, or something small, or something like Wii Party. In the end I deliberately choose a difficult genre, something I wouldn’t usually work with.”

“That’s frankly not a major genre in Japan (shooter), although overseas there are piles of masterpieces in that field. You can’t argue that the marketplace for it [in Japan] is very healthy.”

“I wanted the game flow to involve traveling to enemy territory in the air, then fighting bosses on the ground. The air battles would be done 3D shooter-style and be as simple and exciting as possible, like a roller coaster or some similar ride. It’d be something close to a rail shooter, although you can move Pit around independently. It’d be difficult to make a whole game around that, though, and I didn’t think gamers would be happy with it — that’s where the ground battles come in.”

“During that first conversation with Iwata, I asked him whether I had to stick with a Nintendo franchise for this project. Working on Smash Brothers, I knew all about how much love gamers had for all of Nintendo’s games, and how frustrated they were that some of the series have lain dormant for so long. Any game designer wants to concentrate on original work, but given the role Nintendo had for me, I wanted to know if they had a particular brand they wanted to emphasize.”

“When I presented my project to Nintendo, it was as a wholly original game, but in the end I suggested that we make it a Kid Icarus title instead. I’d have the goddess Palutena grant Pit the power of flight for five minutes at a time, and he’d fly into enemy strongholds and fight enemies on the ground afterwards. It sounded like a ton of fun, I thought, and I got the go-ahead pretty soon afterward.”

“I kicked off the project with a staff that I could count with my fingers. The window glass was razor-thin and wind drafts leaked through them. Since the 3DS was brand-new hardware, there were zero development tools, and even if there were, Nintendo would never let them outside of headquarters. So my chief goal was to settle upon our direction and make things go as smoothly as possible once we started to ramp up staff and move to a bigger office.”

“I’m not the sort of person who wants to tell a story with his games. A game’s scenario acts as a series of signposts to move the player from one situation to the next, giving him a goal to strive for. The dev team needed the design framework so they could start working on stages, so I finished up the story right after the basic project design was done. Based on that, I hired several outside illustrators to come up with concepts for the backgrounds and characters.”

“We’ve gone through a variety of twists and turns in the ensuing year before the E3 announcement,” he said. “FPSes and third-person shooters are an intensely competitive genre to work with; it puts us at a disadvantage from the start, and there’s no way we could outclass the hi-definition visuals of console games on a portable. Nonetheless, I thought that project would be a vital test case to see if we could make a fun, playable, fully-3D game. It’s the first 3DS project ever launched — simple but technically complex, easily learned but deep enough to satisfy gamers. We’re interweaving a variety of conflicting watchwords into the game as development continues.”