Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai says AI-generated games only copy existing ideas
aakashgupta · x · 2026-10-28
Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai argues AI-generated games just copy ideas and systems from existing games, and can't match the "originality" of human creators.
The poster backs him with Sakurai's own counter-example: every '90s fighting game used health bars drained to zero, while Smash flipped it—damage counting up from 0%—and sold over 35 million copies, more than any fighting game ever.
The AI analogy: a model trained on every 1998 fighting game would understand health bars better than any designer, but a damage meter counting up from 0% had zero training examples—which is why genuinely original design is hard for AI to produce.
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