Mashiro Sakurai

For a very long time now, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai has been sharing a 'Pic of the Day' over on Twitter. While he's previously explained how a lot of these screens were never intended to be shown outside of the office, in his most recent Weekly Famitsu column, he revealed the idea behind it – yeah, there's a story.

This long-time tradition dates back to the development of Kid Icarus: Uprising on the Nintendo 3DS. Sakurai would write something daily and attach a picture of the current build of the game to keep the development team up to date. This carried across to future Super Smash Bros. games as well. Here's a translation (thanks, EventHubs):

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As for the reason to why I started doing a "Pic of the Day" for the development team to begin with, it was to create a better flow in a development team which consists of several hundred people.

When you're working on a game as big as this [Super Smash Bros], everyone is divided up into working on different parts and it can be easy to lose sight of what game you're even doing work on, so I think it's important to have something like this as a daily reminder of what the work you're doing is amounting to.

When there's something slightly different waiting for you each day, it becomes a tiny joy to look forward to. "Pic of the Day" was originally meant as a bonus for my staff but curiously ended up becoming a bonus for the fans as well.

So there you have it – it's really just a way for Sakurai to keep his team in the loop so they don't lose sight of the end goal, and it's now something fans can also enjoy regularly on social media.

Did you ever wonder why Sakurai uploaded in-game screenshots regularly before now? Tell us below.

[source eventhubs.com]