Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai explains the importance of presentations

Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai recently posted a new column in one of the latest issues of Famitsu, where he goes in-depth on the topic of presentations and discusses how he went about the roughly 20-minute reveal of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate at E3. He shares some tidbits as well, including the fact that Digital Frontier worked on CG. The design document for Smash Bros. Ultimate is also 200 pages long. Some excerpts from a fan translation of the column are as follows:

This week’s topic is “Presentations.” When you have an idea, you can’t implement it without being able to convey it to somebody else – say, a partner on a project. You can’t just directly connect with somebody through something like telepathy or a cable. It’s difficult! So, to “present” something is to help people understand your idea.

For example, Smash Bros. – particularly before release – is the kind of game that has a dense presentation. The reveal video at E3 was about 20 minutes or so; I wrote the script for it, of course. There really wasn’t anything special about its production, writing the script would eventually boil down to this:

Write out the video’s elements in bullet points.
Separate everything into segments.
Write everything out in sentences.
Edit according to what I wanted to accomplish.

To put it simply, I tried to work from larger concepts to smaller ones. After that, the teams in Kyoto and Tokyo worked on their respective parts, we shot the live-action segment, and Nintendo took care of the editing.

In Smash Bros.’ case in particular, though, that wasn’t it – we had to record segments of the characters fighting as well. We wanted to put a lot of work into this part specifically, so the viewers could enjoy it.

A CG company called Digital Frontier produced the CG parts themselves; though, we couldn’t subcontract them to do everything, of course. I wrote the “plot” first and would check in every so often after we had handed production off to them.

Source: Nintendo Everything