Masahiro Sakurai says Super Smash Bros "might have died out" if not for late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata: "There's no doubt that he influenced me in many ways"

Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai has praised late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's role in not only bringing the iconic fighting series to life, but keeping it going, too.

In a new interview with Japanese site Hoshino (translated via Google), Sakurai is asked how meeting Iwata for a job interview at HAL Laboratory affected his work. In short, quite a bit. Sakurai says he might not have joined HAL if not for Iwata, and had the Nintendo icon not made the prototype for Smash Bros. to begin with, it may not have been released to the world at all. Sakurai also says the series "might have died out" had Iwata not asked him to make Super Smash Bros. Brawl after he left HAL Laboratory.

Given all of that, Sakurai says, "there's no doubt that he influenced me in many ways." The influence Sakurai speaks of, though, is more about the direction of his career than his craft – that he did on his own.

Sakurai recalls a senior colleague being mean to him when he first joined the company. After asking the difference between a proposal and a specification, he was told one was a proposal, and the other was, get this, a specification. Sakurai then knew going the self-taught route was probably for the best.

Unhelpful colleagues aside, it's all worked out rather well for Sakurai. Aside from oodles of beloved games under his belt, it was recently shared that he's being honored by the Japanese government for his exceptional YouTube videos. Sakurai might have been largely self-taught, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from the greats.

Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai says he'll make a game "even if it's the opposite of what I like," because "you have to think of it as work, not entertainment."