Gaming

The Man Behind Smash Bros Just Retired an Award, and Left the Industry a Challenge

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 22, 2026

Masahiro Sakurai spent sixteen years handing out gaming's most idealistic prize, and this month he handed it its last one. At the Japan Game Awards ceremony on September 15, the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator announced that The Game Designers Award, which he founded in 2010 to honor creativity and originality, is being discontinued. The reason is as simple as it is striking. After years of searching, including presentations and direct scouting, the search for a successor came up empty.

The bar for the job explains the vacancy. Sakurai insisted the award needed a chair who is a working director with innovative games that changed how games play, someone whose judgment on originality carries weight because they have shipped it. “I scouted and tried to find someone to replace me,” he said in remarks translated live during the ceremony. “I searched for a couple years, but nobody stepped up.” Plenty of judges serve on panels. Almost nobody wants to own the standard.

The final winner fit the award's spirit perfectly. Team9's Word Game, a puzzle adventure where the protagonist, the buildings, the weapons, everything on screen is composed of literal characters that players push, combine, and erase to solve puzzles, took the last trophy. It is exactly the kind of odd, handcrafted idea the award existed to spotlight, the sort of game that wins on invention rather than budget. The judging panel for the finale read like a hall of fame in itself, with Fumito Ueda, Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Toby Fox, Yoko Taro, and Keiichiro Toyama among the eleven judges.

Then came the line everyone will remember. “Game development is always an experiment, but you keep going at it,” Sakurai said, before delivering the part about what the industry loses along the way. “If the industry loses creativity and innovation, I think the industry as a whole will slowly die. We always need new discoveries and innovations to keep the industry fresh and alive.” He was candid about the economics too, noting that originality only sometimes moves the sales needle, since players usually reach for what they already enjoy, much like ordering the familiar drink instead of the interesting new one.

There is a quiet poignancy in the specific way this award died. Its funding stayed solid and its relevance stayed obvious to the end. What ran out was the supply of successors. The industry still produces people capable of judging originality, the finale panel proves that, but the willingness to stand up and personally vouch for the weird stuff, year after year, turned out to be rarer than the talent itself.

Sakurai's sixteen year experiment proved that celebrating originality changes what gets made, at least at the margins where the weird stuff lives. The award is gone, but its final lesson is portable, and it belongs to everyone making games right now. Ship the strange idea. Somebody has to keep the new discoveries coming, because the man who spent sixteen years handing out trophies for them just told us what happens if they stop.

Sources

• Nintendo Life on Sakurai's announcement
• Automaton Media on the award's final edition

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