Masahiro Sakurai temporaly retired from game development after his work on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was finished three years ago, when they released the final DLC character, Sora from Kingdom Hearts. Since then, he has been making YouTube videos.
Recently, however, he announced the end of his channel, Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games (whose videos were published both in Japanese and English). One of his final videos has been dedicated to Satoru Iwata, beloved Nintendo president who died in 2015 due to illness.
“It wouldn’t be right to end this channel without touching on this topic”, he says. Before being Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata was head of development at HAL Laboratory, and it was Iwata who interviewed Sakurai when he joined the company, being only 19 at the time.
Sakurai later created famous character Kirby as well as fighting game Super Smash Bros. This was also one of the few games where Iwata, who was a programmer before being appointed director of HAL and later Nintendo, was directly involed in the code writing.
“Mr. Iwata was truly the person who understood me best”, Sakurai tells in his video.