Masahiro Sakurai is the creator of Kirby and also the director of the Smash Brothers series and he has now left Nintendo's first party developers HAL Laboratory.

It was first announced in Famitsu Weekly where Sakurai-San stated that he resigned out of his own free will. Other reports suggests he felt unable to create the games he would like at Nintendo.

For the time being he will be doing freelance work. Although Kirby will stay under the control of HAL Laboratory Sakurai-San stated he is unsure about the Smash Bros. series.

"I needed a dummy character to represent what the real character would be doing in the game," he stated in a recent interview. "I just put a Kirby-shaped blob in my presentation as a place-holder, but everyone liked it so much we decided to keep it in the game without any major changes." He also spoke about the colour of Kirby. "Mr. Miyamoto, on the other hand, envisioned Kirby as yellow. Since Kirby's first game was on Game Boy, no one knew what Kirby's true colour was unless we told them."

Nintendo have yet to comment on the matter but may do so at Thursday's conference.