“Rather than just tossing in a coin and getting into the game immediately, you must click an icon, wait for the logo, wait for the title, look at the instructions screen, wait until everything loads, and then you’re finally at the main screen, after which you can start playing.
“I want you to measure the total time this takes and shorten it by even one second.”
To prove that he was serious about this, Sakurai then revealed that GameCube racing game Kirby Air Ride was originally supposed to have Dolby Surround audio, but Sakurai chose to ditch it because it would have meant showing the Dolby logo at the start of the game for a few seconds.
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose.”
To be real, how many of you even actually know what Dolby Surround is or refers to? No snark, genuinely wonder. Bonus points because Sakurai is using the wrong term for it here.
Multichannel is cool in racing games, like Forza Motorsport 4 is cool in 5.1 but for Air Ride it was probably the right call cutting it to save bootup time, given how few people likely had their Gaemcoobs hooked up to a hifi.