Masahiro Sakurai, born on August third, 1987,) is the man who created Kirby and Super Smash Brothers. He used to work at Hal Laboratories, developing games. He needed a new character, and was creating a game for beginners. He wanted to make it so anyone could beat this game, but still keep it enjoyable. While making the game, he created a dummy character. He added a little ball with hands and feet as the character. This character was never meant to be permanent, but it became popular among the other people at Hal, and Sakurai decided to keep it.

Early into developement, they were calling Kirby by the name of Popopo. They were originally going to call the series Twinkle Popopo, rather than Kirby of the Stars. As stated in an interview on Nintendo.com, Sakurai still can't remember how Kirby got his name. Some say it was the Kirby vacuum cleaner, others say it comes from the name of the lawyer who saved Nintendo in a lawsuit against Atari. What the reason really is (perhaps he just thought it sounded cute) is still unknown, but neither surprise me. Sakurai imagined Kirby to be pink. the first game was black and white, though, so nobody knew what color he was. Miyamoto imagined Kirby as being yellow, but pink finally won.

While the original Kirby game was created for beginners, they wanted to do something different for later games. Sakurai wanted the new game to be for both advanced players amd beginners. With this goal, they created Kirby's signature ability- Inhale and copy. Beginners would enjoy running around and using his new powers, while advanced players would enjoy going through the game. This ability is now a standard part of the Kirby series, and you'll rarely find him without it. This ability also gave the character his enormous appetite.

When Kirby 64 came around, Sakurai wasn't involved in the production at all. Some say he was developing a new game, and some say he had lost interest in the series. Nintendo.com, however, says otherwise. When asked if he had seen Kirby 64 yet, Sakurai answered, "I haven't played it yet. Actually, I've been trying to avoid even taking a peek at Kirby 64. I'm afraid I'd start making comments which might conflict with the vision of the development team and create confusion." He had hoped to work on later Kirby games, actually. Where the idea went I'm not entirely sure, unfortunately.

In 2003, he stopped working for Hal Laboratories. He said he was unhappy with the structure of the company. He wanted more freedom when working on games. He started his own company, and didn't take Kirby with him, leaving many people to believe the Kirby series had ended. However, Hal had no intention of ending it, and Kirby is alive and well today. People had asked him to co-develope games with them after that, but Sakurai wanted to wait until after E3 2005 to decide anything. At E3, they announced a third Super Smash Brothers. Sakurai had not heard anything about a new SSB! It turns out, the game wasn't even in developement yet. Soon afterwards, when he was talking with his old boss (Satoru Iwata, former Hal Laboratories president, now the president of Nintendo), he was asked to be the head of the Smash Brothers team, again. Iwata said that Sakurai had known what the gamers wanted, and he had made the earlier games great. If he was going to ask anything to work on this game, it'd be Sakurai. After considering it for a while, Sakurai agreed. They still needed a team to work on the game. Sakurai hoped for around 50 people on their team. The new studio is in Tokyo, where Sakurai now lives. He has an apartment near the studio. I have heard that many cats live in this apartment, and that Sakurai is fond of them.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is set to be released in 2008, and after that, who knows? Sakurai may or may not be involved in future Hal Laboratories games, but only time will tell. Wether or not he and Kirby will ever meet again is uncertain, but we can all pray.

• Interview on Nintendo.com
• Kirby's Rainbow Resort - Masahiro Sakurai
• Smash Bros. Dojo, Sakurai's blog
• Wikipedia - Masahiro Sakurai