Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has revealed the immense amount of pain that he’s currently in, having been diagnosed with calcific tendonitis and ruptured muscles within his right arm.
“I think the one word I’ve said the most this year, by far, is ‘Ow!’ Not only am I getting calcific tendonitis, but they’ve also found what are apparently several ruptures in the muscles,” Sakurai explained within his Famitsu column.
“My upper arm hurts, and there’s this chronic dull pain in my elbow joint as well. On the lower arm, there’s this feeling of fatigue around the flexor muscles that turns into pain when I use a keyboard or game controller with my fingers.
“There’s no instant cure for it, so all I can do is either block the pain with injections or put my arm in a cast to keep the ruptures from spreading. I was told that the important thing was to keep my arm as rested as possible. In order to get it fully healed, the only thing is to not use my right arm or hand. So not only am I using a trackball with my left hand; now I’m using it to eat, brush my teeth, wash my hair, and even drive as much as I’m able to.”
The implications of such injury are proving troubling to Sakurai in leading development of the next Super Smash Bros. games.
“As a director, I don’t have much time in the weekdays to proceed along with my own work,” he continued. “The entire day is spent overseeing other people, holding meetings, working on other proposals, making visits elsewhere and so on.
“If I can get everything squared away, then I can work on my own stuff, but most of the time there’s just an overwhelming lack of time. Often I go in on my off-days to catch up on my own work, but with my body going on me like this, I have to cut these extra days out of my schedule and even with that I can’t use my right arm very much to control things. If this disorder lingers, or if it never gets fixed, there’s no telling what impact that would have on the project.”
Sakurai is saddened by the fact that the level of pain means he cannot play Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, as well as hampering his efforts to playtest the current builds available for Super Smash Bros.
He closes, “I’ve had to control two characters at once in a lot of game projects up to now, so as long as I keep it to simple moves, this works well enough. It doesn’t go that easy with the Nintendo 3DS version, though, and the debug camera is pretty hard to control. Still, now I realise how important it is to have your health. I’m glad I’m still in good enough shape to work.”
[Thanks Polygon]
Masahiro Sakurai’s injury hampering Super Smash Bros. progress
