Masahiro Sakurai's Bad Arm: New Super Smash Bros. Could Suffer?
When you're working in the creative industry of any kind; especially the game industry, your arms, wrists and hands are highly important. You may work continuous hours and have the unfortunate developing of repetitive strain injury on the muscles, tendons and nerves of the upper body, causing pain and swelling. As an artist & writer it's bad enough getting a shooting pain through my strongest hand from overworking it and RSI can be a frightening thought.
Masahiro Sakurai, the father of the Kirby franchise is said to suffer from RSI in his right arm & hand which is affecting his sadly both his lifestyle, his work at Nintendo-and most recently the development of the new Super Smash Bros. According to Polygon, Sakurai stated:
"I think the one word I've said the most this year, by far, is 'Ow!'" he wrote. "Not only am I getting calcific tendonitis, but they've also found what are apparently several ruptures in the muscles. 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."
Due to his disorder it's affecting his role as the director for the new Super Smash Bros. game, forcing him to sit back on the sideline and oversee the others as they work, be the leader at meetings, working on other areas of his work and so on; though he claims there is such a lack of time to get everything done according to schedule and he'll even come in on his days off to attempt to get as much work as he can done possibly manage. Sakurai is unsure on how this will affect the development of SSB for the time being as his RSI continues to affect him and get slowly more painful, but he makes sure he can still do quality assurance testing on the game in progress using his left hand to the best of his ability and using trackballs to keep his right arm at ease.
Health is far more important than the completion of a extremely high profiled game project. As much as I look forward to the new Super Smash Bros., I think Sakurai needs to take a short break and relax as it seems he's far too overworked & under pressure. His RSI won't get any better at this rate...I wish you all the best in recovering nicely.
Curl up in a little ball like Kirby and get some well deserved rest!
Masahiro Sakurai, the father of the Kirby franchise is said to suffer from RSI in his right arm & hand which is affecting his sadly both his lifestyle, his work at Nintendo-and most recently the development of the new Super Smash Bros. According to Polygon, Sakurai stated:
"I think the one word I've said the most this year, by far, is 'Ow!'" he wrote. "Not only am I getting calcific tendonitis, but they've also found what are apparently several ruptures in the muscles. 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."
Due to his disorder it's affecting his role as the director for the new Super Smash Bros. game, forcing him to sit back on the sideline and oversee the others as they work, be the leader at meetings, working on other areas of his work and so on; though he claims there is such a lack of time to get everything done according to schedule and he'll even come in on his days off to attempt to get as much work as he can done possibly manage. Sakurai is unsure on how this will affect the development of SSB for the time being as his RSI continues to affect him and get slowly more painful, but he makes sure he can still do quality assurance testing on the game in progress using his left hand to the best of his ability and using trackballs to keep his right arm at ease.
Health is far more important than the completion of a extremely high profiled game project. As much as I look forward to the new Super Smash Bros., I think Sakurai needs to take a short break and relax as it seems he's far too overworked & under pressure. His RSI won't get any better at this rate...I wish you all the best in recovering nicely.
Curl up in a little ball like Kirby and get some well deserved rest!
No comments: