Masahiro Sakurai Shows How to Make Games in Family BASIC

The latest episode of Masahiro Sakurai’s YouTube channel about making games actually involves him showing how Family BASIC worked. This was a Famicom peripheral and tool for creation, and Sakurai explained how critical it was to his own career and decisions to get into gaming. For the presentation, he actually offers an overview of the software and shows how it works in practice.

Here’s the new “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games” video about Family BASIC. It begins by him saying how he got into developing because of experience with it and shows his copy. He noted that he repainted the keyboard personally. After explaining how it works, he shows how it would work. He also showed how there was a “Hello” function that allowed it to “tell your fortune.” The primary function is Game Basic, which is used for creating games by going into BASIC or BG Graphic. He also noted it is Hu-BASIC, referencing Hudson developed for Sharp and that was used here. He then actually writes some code and shows how the background creation worked. He ended up showing how the cartridge actually had a AA battery backup. He brought up the data recorder peripheral as well.

In the meantime, similar sorts of game creation software still exist. For example, SmileBASIC appeared on the 3DS and Wii U.

In the past, Masahiro Sakurai used his channel to talk about creating other games, such as Kirby titles and Meteos.