Masahiro Sakurai (Sakurai Masahiro, born August 3, 1970) is a Japanese video game director, game designer and songwriter[1] best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. Apart from his work on those series, he also led the design of Meteos in 2005 and directed Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012. Formerly an employee of HAL Laboratory, he left the company in 2003 and in 2005 with his wife Michiko Sakurai (also ex-Hal Laboratory), they founded Sora Ltd., a shell company that works on a freelance basis on several projects. He is also an author of a weekly column for Famitsu magazine, and has done voice acting work in some of his games, most notably providing the voice of King Dedede in Kirby 64 and the Super Smash Bros. series. Masahiro Sakurai was born on August 3, 1970, in Musashimurayama, Tokyo, Japan. One of Sakurai's earliest experiences in the video game industry began when he worked for HAL Laboratory, where he created the character Kirby at age 19 and directed his first title, Kirby's Dream Land. Sakurai left HAL on August 5, 2003, after growing tired of the sequelization passively forced by HAL, ending his work on the Kirby series. "It was tough for me to see that every time I made a new game, people automatically assumed that a sequel was coming," Sakurai commented, in an interview with Nintendo Dream, two weeks after he resigned from HAL. He explained that, "even if it's a sequel, lots of people have to give their all to make a game, but some people think the sequel process happens naturally".