Masahiro Sakurai's been teasing the Nintendo faithful for years. As one of the masterminds behind the Smash Bros. fighting franchise, the game director was responsible for putting Pit, star of the old-school NES game
Kid Icarus, in 2008's
Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This move not only delighted fans of the plucky angel hero but it created an annual tradition where rumors of a new Kid Icarus game would pop up. It'd been 17 years between the
Kid Icarus game on the Game Boy (remember those?) and Pit's appearance in
SSBB, so surely something had to be coming, right? I even made this frothing desire for more
Icarus the point of
one of my April Fool's Day posts.
But Nintendo finally announced a new
Kid Icarus game this E3 and said that it's going to be the marquee game for the new Nintendo 3DS handheld. Prior to E3, Nintendo reps reached out with an opportunity to interview a high-profile mystery developer. It wasn't until I stepped into the room that I became aware that I'd be interviewing Sakurai-san. What followed was a wide-ranging discussion about bringing back Pit, the different strengths of Western and Japanese game development and designing a title to take advantage of the specific capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS.