We all remember those days leading up to the launch of Smash Bros. entries like BRAWL and Ultimate; waiting for any scrap of new information on potential fighters, stages, items, and more was certainly taxing at times, but goodness, it felt like Christmas morning everytime something significant was revealed.
In his latest video, Masahiro Sakurai looks back on the creation and implementation of the ‘Dojo’ marketing campaigns for the Super Smas Bros. franchise. As he touched on in a previous video, there was an iteration of the campaign for the original N64 title, though this wasn’t particularly well known outside of Japan, and thanks to the infantcy of the internet back in those days, very little of it lived up to Sakurai’s high standards.
He then goes through how he approached the same campaign for subsequent entries, revealing that he updated the Dojo website himself for Melee, rather than asking his team to do it on his behalf. His reasoning for this is simple: he knew the game the best and felt that having to brief and review the entries from his team would take too much time.
It’s worth watching the video; like Sakurai’s other posts on YouTube, it’s reasonably short, but it’s an interesting look into the history of the Smash Bros. franchise and how Sakurai tackled the marketing for each game.