is a Japanese video game director and game designer best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. Apart from his work on those series, he also led the design of Meteos in 2005 and directed Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012. Formerly an employee of HAL Laboratory, he left the company in 2003 and in 2005 with his wife Michiko Sakurai (also ex-HAL Laboratory), they founded , a shell company that works on a freelance basis on several projects. He was also an author of a weekly column for Famitsu magazine for decades until the 2020s, and has done voice acting work in some of his games, most notably providing the voice of King Dedede in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and the Super Smash Bros. series. Career Masahiro Sakurai was born on August 3, 1970, in Musashimurayama, Tokyo, Japan. One of Sakurai's earliest experiences in the video game industry began when he worked for HAL Laboratory, where he created the character Kirby at age 19 and directed his first title, Kirby's Dream Land. Sakurai left HAL on August 5, 2003, after growing tired of the sequelization passively forced by HAL, ending his work on the Kirby series. "It was tough for me to see that every time I made a new game, people automatically assumed that a sequel was coming," Sakurai commented, in an interview with Nintendo Dream, two weeks after he resigned from HAL. He explained that, "even if it's a sequel, lots of people have to give their all to make a game, but some people think the sequel process happens naturally". Soon after, Sakurai began working on a project with Q Entertainment, along with Tetsuya Mizuguchi. This collaboration resulted in Meteos in 2005, a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS. On September 30, 2005, Sakurai announced that he had formed his own company, Sora Ltd. Two titles were announced to be in development but no information on the titles had been divulged. As for the future of the Super Smash Bros. series, Nintendo and HAL Laboratory's President Satoru Iwata, during Nintendo's E3 2005 press conference, promised an online iteration of the game would come to Nintendo's video game console Wii. In issue #885 of Famitsu magazine, Sakurai revealed that he would be serving as a director and game designer on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii. Super Smash Bros. Brawl was