Kirby fans have noticed that Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai was hiding the fact he was working on Kirby Air Riders in plain sight in his old tweets.
I think it's safe to say that there probably wasn't one person on the planet who expected that one of the first games Nintendo announced for the Switch 2 way back in April would be a sequel to the GameCube title Kirby Air Ride. While Air Ride still has a cult following all these years later, the game itself had extremely mixed reviews (with Edge giving it a 3/10), and – being a GameCube game – probably didn't light the world on fire with its sales either.
And if it wasn't so unexpected, people probably would've figured it out years prior, as one fan has noticed that game director Masahiro Sakurai has been hiding it in plain sight. Bluesky user SinkerGhost shares a thread saying, "Looking back on Sakurai's Twitter with the knowledge he's been working on Air Riders since 2022 is so funny."
Included is a tweet from February 2, 2025, two months before the reveal of Air Riders, in which he quote tweeted a Kirby plush toy announcement and (via translation from GamesRadar+), said: "Maybe I should buy one to celebrate... (What am I celebrating?)" Given that nobody would even think twice about the Kirby creator wanting a plush, the fact that no one caught on to the apparent teaser of what he could be celebrating is very funny to look back on.
An even funnier instance in hindsight is from May 2022, when he tweeted that he had a meeting online with some of his old colleagues from Kirby developer HAL Laboratory and that it was a great meeting, as the vibes hadn't really changed at all despite him leaving over 20 years ago.
As we know now from the Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel, he started development on his newest game in April 2022, meaning he was tweeting about a meeting with the Kirby developers literally one month after starting on Air Riders, and we were none the wiser. Speaking of that last video, SinkerGhost also points out that the ending of his YouTube series was a little picture of Kirby with a sign saying "bye-bye," knowing full well that the next time we'd see him would be for Kirby Air Riders.
Now that Kirby Air Riders is out, everyone is making the same joke about Nintendo immediately asking Masahiro Sakurai to work on Super Smash Bros 6: "Alright. We let you make Air Riders. You know what comes next…"
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