December 3^rd, 2005 (4:54pm) - Masahiro Sakurai was recently revealed to be heading up the new Super Smash Bros. project for the Nintendo Revolution. The independant developer sat down for a chat with Famitsu and revealed some details.

Sakurai said that development for the project started about May of 2005, and says he alone comprised the entire staff at the start.

As for now, a currently unnamed outside developer is working with Sakurai on the project.

"Shigeru Miyamoto introduced me to a ’particular company’ that had just finished development of a major game," Sakurai revealed.

Apparantly these unnamed developers have played an absurd amount of Super Smash Bros. Melee, to the point that the rubber tips on their Gamecube analog sticks have worn down. Sakurai says he checked their save files, and found they indeed had played the game a lot.

Sakurai won’t be developing the game internally at Nintendo either-- he opened up a seperate Nintendo office in Tokyo specifically for this project in October.

The team developing the game won’t be small.

"To make a Smash Bros. DX class game, you’d want at the least something on the scale of 50 people," he comments.

Since Sakurai is a former Nintendo employee, and the project is under direct Nintendo supervision, he and his team will have access to all of the Gamecube coding for SSBM, so the team won’t be starting from scratch.