Sakurai talks Smash Bros dev

Masahiro Sakurai says that development of Smash Bros. for Revolution has barely begun, and that he didn't even know about it until Nintendo announced it at E3.

Speaking in Famitsu last month, Sakurai said that Satoru Iwata got in touch after announcing it at E3 along with the Revolution console, and proposed that he design and direct it.

Sakurai agreed, but still didn't have a team. It sounds like the last few months have been spent getting ready for work - Sakurai's recruited folks from a Smash Bros.-obsessed developer introduced to him by Shigeru Miyamoto, set up a new office in Tokyo near where he lives, and been in touch with his old pals at HAL Lab about borrowing some of the tools from the development of Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube.

"To make a Smash Bros. DX class game, you'd want at the least something on the scale of 50 people," he's told Famitsu, adding that he'll be starting recruitment through Nintendo's website soon.

Quite what this says about Smash Bros' chances of arriving alongside the Revolution itself is hard to say - Nintendo's keen to shorten development times, but given its investment here is likely to want to give it time to blossom.

Still, it sounds like the team's well-versed in what it's doing - Sakurai remarks that upon visiting his development partners, he discovered that their GameCube controller analogue sticks had been worn down almost completely thanks to countless hours of Melee. A bit like how my WaveBird has been broken in half by countless seconds of stamping on it in Mario Kart-induced fury. (Does this mean I can develop Revolution games?)