Last week we brought you some interesting insights from Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai from a recent meeting with Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada. Well, now the second part of the interview has been shared, and it has also left us with some more curious details.
In the meeting, the creative spoke about a recurring theme: his retirement. Sakurai shares that his generation considers retirement at the age of 60 to be fixed, thinking for years beforehand about how long it will be before they retire. However, he believes that after retirement one should continue to live and work.
He adds that the quality of life is increasing, people are dying later and, if you are able to do the things you do at that age, he sees no harm in continuing to work. He thinks that in the world of videogames there is always a demand, so for him this idea of continuing to work beyond the age of 60 does fit in. Even so, he acknowledges that making video games is not an easy task and points out that playing video games is more fun than creating them because sometimes there can be setbacks in development.
He finds this quite hard, especially because it is still “a competition where you have to fight and survive”. That’s why he thinks he won’t be able to choose when he wants to retire. He hopes to be able to work as long as he can, something he shared by drawing a comparison between quitting smoking and quitting making video games: “If your heart stops, you can quit smoking, but if it doesn’t and there’s a demand, you can keep doing it forever.