Masahiro Sakurai continues to share insights into his storied history in the video game industry along with game design tips and his own philosophy. And today, the creator of the Super Smash Bros. series has pulled back the curtain on one of his first major projects after going freelance — the 2005 DS puzzle game Meteos.
While working as a supervisor and doing consulting work on various video games, Sakurai was approached by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, a developer who formerly worked at Sega. Mizuguchi wanted Sakurai to make a falling-block puzzle game. Amusingly, Sakurai admits that he's "really bad at falling-block puzzle games", especially Puyo-Puyo (though he did supervision work on Kirby's Avalanche, a Puyo-Puyo-inspired Kirby puzzle game), but says that working on a new genre was a "fascinating challenge".
Discussing his thought process, Sakurai wanted to change the risk/reward system of other falling-block puzzle games, mainly the central concept — what if you didn't have to destroy the blocks? So instead, he came up with turning the blocks into little rocket ships that blast off, which is probably the cutest, most-recognisable thing about the game to us.
Sakurai even shows off a glimpse of the original PowerPoint presentation he created to demonstrate the game, which is full of adorable animations. We can't resist those little blue aliens! The developer goes on to talk about Meteos as a whole, including the different level designs and the various versions of the game such as the Disney one, which Sakurai didn't work on.