Sakurai's 'Mr. Sakurai Presents' redefined gaming hype with Smash Bros. Ultimate

Masahiro Sakurai stood in front of a modest setup—minimal lighting, a simple backdrop, a low budget stretched across years of announcements—and changed how the video game industry talks to its players. The director of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had just revealed Sora, the protagonist from Kingdom Hearts, as the final character joining the game's roster. It was October 2021, and after nearly a decade of reveals, each one carefully orchestrated through a series called 'Mr. Sakurai Presents,' the largest fighting game ever made was closing its doors.

The presentation format itself was unremarkable on its surface. Sakurai would appear on Nintendo's YouTube channel at irregular times, discussing new fighters, modes, and cosmetics for customizable Mii characters. Thousands would gather in the chat, speculating wildly, spamming rumors, waiting for the moment he would unveil what came next. But something about the simplicity—the lack of production gloss, the direct-feed gameplay footage, the genuine explanations of how each character was built—turned routine announcements into cultural events. The gaming internet would collapse into itself each time.

This wasn't always the case. Six years before Ultimate's launch, when Super Smash Bros. released on Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, the series held a 'Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot' to ask players who they wanted to see next. Sora won. But Sakurai and then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata made a deliberate choice: they would not reveal the results. Sakurai explained the reasoning plainly—if fans knew which characters ranked highest, they would demand them from their respective companies, creating friction between the parties involved. The secret stayed buried for years, until Sora's final reveal made it public.

The reveal format itself had evolved dramatically. When Brawl launched in 2006 and 2007, the announcement that two non-Nintendo characters would join the roster nearly broke the internet. Metal Gear's Solid Snake appeared in a teaser trailer for the game's high-definition version. Then came Sonic the Hedgehog. The community reeled. Gaming forums and news outlets scrambled to process what was happening. Brawl arrived with a theme composed by Nobuo Uematsu, the Final Fantasy series' legendary composer, and ushered in a new era of how fighting games could engage their audience. What had started as simple computer-generated cinematics evolved into richly detailed, narrative-driven trailers that seemed to represent something larger than just a roster update.

Sakurai himself remained largely absent from public conversation. He was reluctant to give interviews, wary of the weight that came with speaking about his work. A brief conversation with WIRED at the 2008 Game Developer's Conference lasted under three minutes. But when he finally stepped in front of the camera for 'Mr. Sakurai Presents,' something shifted. Katsuhiro Harada, the legendary director of Tekken, invited Sakurai onto his YouTube talk show 'Harada's Bar' earlier in 2021 to discuss the pressures and importance of public communication about game development. Harada emphasized how transformative Sakurai's presentations had been—offering direct gameplay footage, development insights, and a window into the creative process that few directors had ever opened so wide.

The presentations became a form of community archaeology. When Sakurai revealed Banjo-Kazooie in 2019, he encouraged players to experience the original Rare game on Xbox. The title trended in Japan despite Microsoft's historical struggles in the region. During the pandemic, when Sakurai presented the second Fighters Pass from his living room—subtitles replacing his usual English voiceover, his home standing in for the studio—viewers combed through images of his background searching for clues about the next character. Every detail became a potential hint. Every presentation was an event.

The Wii U era had established the visual language that would define these reveals. Characters like Villager, Wii Fit Trainer, and Mega Man received fully realized cinematics that told their story as they joined the roster. This was when DLC characters were first introduced to Smash, and it became the foundation for what 'Mr. Sakurai Presents' would become. Each reveal was carefully curated, initially posted on the Super Smash Bros. Dojo website, then expanded into something more intimate and direct.

With Sora's announcement, an era closed. The series had redefined what community engagement could look like in gaming—not through aggressive marketing or manufactured hype, but through transparency, consistency, and genuine creative work shown plainly. Sakurai had built something that transcended the fighting game itself. The influence would ripple forward into how the industry approached character reveals, how developers spoke to players, and how a single person with a modest setup could reshape expectations across an entire medium. The next chapter of Super Smash Bros. would come eventually, but the template Sakurai had created—the one that proved players wanted to see the work, not just the result—would endure.