Sakurai Reveals He Secretly Wrote Kirby's Air Riders Main Theme Lyrics

Masahiro Sakurai used the second-to-last entry in Nintendo's "One Question One Answer" series for Kirby's Air Riders to quietly drop a personal admission: he wrote the main theme song lyrics himself, and he had been sitting on that information until now. He also used the entry to explain why he previously kept that fact under wraps, though his full reasoning wasn't captured in available summaries of the post.

The dev diary entry, focused primarily on Road Trip, the Switch 2 title's story mode, doubles as Sakurai's most candid accounting yet of how the game took shape. Road Trip wasn't part of the initial design plan. Sakurai knew some players would want single-player content, and his solution was structural: "When considering how to pull together existing gameplay elements to keep players playing long-term, the only real option was to give them a series of challenges."

The design problem that followed was pacing. Clearing challenges sequentially from start to finish would become tedious, so Sakurai reframed the entire mode as a journey. Players choose from three branching paths, with larger branch points generating different worlds to keep the experience varied. "After exploring these ideas in depth, I felt as though I could put together the basic game for Road Trip," he wrote. That left one unresolved question he posed directly: "The problem then was the story… Why do the Riders ride?"

Road Trip pulls challenges from each of the game's three returning modes, functioning as an integrated story experience rather than a standalone addition. Unlock conditions documented in fan wiki Wikirby give a sense of how deeply Road Trip threads through the rest of the game. Bandana Waddle Dee, described as "a sturdy rider who builds Boost Charge quickly," can be unlocked through Road Trip by clearing Top Ride challenges a total of three times, or through City Trial by destroying two boxes within 30 seconds of a match's start.

The same entry addressed two other design questions Sakurai hadn't previously answered publicly: why the roster leans heavily on enemy characters, and why the original City Trial map from Kirby Air Ride didn't return. His full explanations on both points weren't included in available summaries and would require the complete One Question One Answer post to quote accurately.

The lyrics revelation is the detail most likely to travel. Sakurai is well known for his extensive public documentation of game development through his now-concluded YouTube channel, where he posted over 250 videos explaining design philosophy across his career. According to Wikirby's development notes, he was approached by Nintendo in July 2021 to make a game proposal, with full production beginning in April 2022. He described the period near the end of his YouTube channel's run, when he was producing videos and developing Kirby's Air Riders simultaneously, as difficult. That he was also writing song lyrics during that stretch adds another layer to a production timeline he has been methodically unpacking in the weeks before the game's release.