One day before Nintendo streamed their highly anticipated Nintendo Switch 2 Direct , Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai posted on X/Twitter denying knowing the contents of the live stream. “People might overanalyze whatever I say, but I really don’t know the announcement details,” the tweet reads.
Well, it turns out the post was a misdirect. Among the news revealed during the stream was an announcement for Kirby Air Riders, a brand-new project being helmed by Sakurai himself.
“An entire hour?! Wow, that’s surprising.
…People might overanalyze whatever I say, but I really don’t know the announcement details. (I’m an outsider to Nintendo, after all.)
I’m looking forward to it!”
In a later tweet, Sakurai reminded his fans about a project hinted at in his final YouTube video. That “hint”, by the way, was a throwaway line in the video’s final 10 minutes where he describes the “challenge of managing [his YouTube channel] alongside [his] game project.” It turns out that game project was Kirby Air Riders.
Sakurai recent rise to prominence has come alongside the explosion in popularity of the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Because of this, many fans assumed the project Sakurai was hinting at was related to that franchise. What many had seemingly forgotten was that Sakurai is also the father of Kirby—he developed the first game in the early nineties when he was only 19 years old.
“The secret project I mentioned in the final episode of my YouTube channel…
Has now been revealed to the world.”
From 2022 to 2024, Sakurai ran the YouTube channel Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, where he uploaded a series of educational videos diving into his philosophy on game making. The channel uploaded its last video in October 2024—just over 5 months ago. In early March, the video series earned Sakurai the prestigious Art Encouragement Prize from the Japanese government for its contributions toward promoting Japanese culture and art both.
At this point, we don’t know much about Kirby Air Riders. What’s clear from the trailer is that it’s coming in 2025 and is a successor to Kirby Air Ride, the pink puff’s 2003 racing game for GameCube. Let this be a lesson to all of us to at least check the post date before trusting anything on the internet—even our favorite wholesome game creators.
