quoteThe last time we checked in with game designer Masahiro Sakurai, he was explaining in his regular Famitsu column how Nintendo president Satoru Iwata personally asked him in early 2008 to develop a launch title for the system we now call the Nintendo 3DS. How did that game become Kid Icarus: Uprising, though?
As Sakurai put it, the decision stemmed all the way back to 2008, when he was still trying to figure out what kind of game to make. "Most of the games due to come out during the launch window were probably going to be ports," he wrote. "I could have chosen a genre that was easy to develop, but I doubted Iwata wanted something everyone's seen before, or something small, or something like Wii Party. In the end I deliberately choose a difficult genre, something I wouldn't usually work with."
In Sakurai's case, that would be the shooter genre. "That's frankly not a major genre in Japan," he admitted, "although overseas there are piles of masterpieces in that field. You can't argue that the marketplace for it [in Japan] is very healthy."
He chose that genre nonetheless because it seemed to be a good match for the upcoming system's 3D graphics. "I wanted the game flow to involve traveling to enemy territory in the air, then fighting bosses on the ground," he said. "The air battles would be done 3D shooter-style and be as simple and exciting as possible, like a roller coaster or some similar ride. It'd be something close to a rail shooter, although you can move Pit around independently. It'd be difficult to make a whole game around that, though, and I didn't think gamers would be happy with it -- that's where the ground battles come in."
Sakurai had a basic design down quickly enough, and after repeated visits to Nintendo and interviews with potential studio members, his project plan was formally approved in October of 2008. At the time, though, the game wasn't Kid Icarus yet -- it was still an original franchise.
"During that first conversation with Iwata, I asked him whether I had to stick with a Nintendo franchise for this project," Sakurai said. "Working on Smash Brothers, I knew all about how much love gamers had for all of Nintendo's games, and how frustrated they were that some of the series have lain dormant for so long. Any game designer wants to concentrate on original work, but given the role Nintendo had for me, I wanted to know if they had a particular brand they wanted to emphasize." Iwata's response? "If you think your project would be a good fit for one franchise or another, let's think about it then."
That was all the impetus Sakurai needed -- and as he began revising his project plan, Kid Icarus naturally came to mind, partly because of how popular the title remains in the West today. "When I presented my project to Nintendo, it was as a wholly original game, but in the end I suggested that we make it a Kid Icarus title instead," he revealed. "I'd have the goddess Palutena grant Pit the power of flight for five minutes at a time, and he'd fly into enemy strongholds and fight enemies on the ground afterwards. It sounded like a ton of fun, I thought, and I got the go-ahead pretty soon afterward."
With Uprising officially underway, Sakurai rented out a small office space in the Takadanobaba district of Tokyo in November 2008. "I kicked off the project with a staff that I could count with my fingers," he said. "The window glass was razor-thin and wind drafts leaked through them. Since the 3DS was brand-new hardware, there were zero development tools, and even if there were, Nintendo would never let them outside of headquarters. So my chief goal was to settle upon our direction and make things go as smoothly as possible once we started to ramp up staff and move to a bigger office."
It was in this drafty old office that Sakurai finalized the project plan and wrote Uprising's story. "I'm not the sort of person who wants to tell a story with his games," he said. "A game's scenario acts as a series of signposts to move the player from one situation to the next, giving him a goal to strive for. The dev team needed the design framework so they could start working on stages, so I finished up the story right after the basic project design was done. Based on that, I hired several outside illustrators to come up with concepts for the backgrounds and characters."
Sakurai's "Project Sora" began officially recruiting staff in March of 2009, marking the more-or-less official start of development -- and we all saw the fruits of their labor in Los Angeles last month. "We've gone through a variety of twists and turns in the ensuing year before the E3 announcement," he said. "FPSes and third-person shooters are an intensely competitive genre to work with; it puts us at a disadvantage from the start, and there's no way we could outclass the hi-definition visuals of console games on a portable. Nonetheless, I thought that project would be a vital test case to see if we could make a fun, playable, fully-3D game. It's the first 3DS project ever launched -- simple but technically complex, easily learned but deep enough to satisfy gamers. We're interweaving a variety of conflicting watchwords into the game as development continues."
