HAL Laboratory

History

HAL Laboratory's story begins on February 21, 1980, in the Kanda district of Chiyoda, Tokyo — born not from a corporate boardroom, but from a chance encounter at a Seibu Department Store computer corner in Ikebukuro. A store clerk noticed a group of university students who kept coming back to tinker with the machines on display, and that spark of mutual recognition led to the founding of a company. Backed by Iwasaki Technical Engineering, the nascent studio launched with a single full-time employee and six part-time workers from a single room in an Akihabara apartment building. The company's name, 'HAL,' was chosen with deliberate ambition: shift each letter of 'IBM' one step back in the alphabet, and you get H, A, L — a quiet declaration that HAL intended to be one step ahead of the industry giant. The name also echoed HAL 9000, the iconic computer from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, lending the young studio an air of technological mystique.

Among those early volunteers was Satoru Iwata, then a student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who joined as a part-time programmer. After graduating in 1982, he became HAL's fifth full-time employee — a fact that would prove consequential for the entire history of Japanese game development. HAL's initial work was largely contract programming, building software for early personal computers at a time when the Japanese games industry was still finding its footing. The studio's first breakthrough came through a connection to Nintendo: via its relationship with Iwasaki Technical Engineering, HAL was engaged to assist with development on first-party Famicom titles including Pinball and Golf, giving the young company its first taste of console game production and its first sustained relationship with the company that would define its future.

Through the second half of the 1980s, HAL grew steadily, building a reputation as a technically capable studio willing to push hardware boundaries. The company's headcount climbed, ambitions expanded, and in 1989 a young new hire named Masahiro Sakurai walked through the door. Sakurai was nineteen years old and brimming with ideas; he would go on to conceive and design two of the most beloved franchises in Nintendo history. The late 1980s also saw HAL contributing to an increasingly wide range of projects, deepening its ties with Nintendo while simultaneously developing its own creative voice. It was a period of optimism — perhaps too much optimism.

The early 1990s brought expansion and disaster in almost equal measure. By 1990, HAL's staff had grown to roughly ninety people, and in April 1991 the company completed construction of a dedicated development center in Yamanashi Prefecture, largely financed through bank loans. That same year, HAL released Metal Slader Glory on the Famicom — a four-years-in-the-making, eight-megabit visual novel that represented the largest Famicom cartridge ever produced at that point. The timing could not have been worse. The Super Famicom had already begun reshaping the market, and consumers had little appetite for the aging hardware. The game could not even recoup its advertising costs, and a second production run was out of the question. The debt service on the Yamanashi facility compounded the losses. On June 22, 1992, HAL Laboratory filed for wagi — a form of civil rehabilitation — with total liabilities of approximately five billion yen. It was the first bankruptcy among Nintendo's third-party development partners.

Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi agreed to support HAL's recovery, but his terms were precise: Satoru Iwata must become president. Iwata was thirty-three years old. He accepted the condition without hesitation, took the chair in March 1993, drew up a six-year repayment plan, and then got to work. His approach to the crisis was characteristically direct: he imposed a strict internal policy that HAL would only develop titles expected to reach one million units in sales — no passion projects, no experimental detours until the books were clean. The discipline was severe, but it produced results. HAL's salvation came, in part, from a pink sphere. Kirby's Dream Land, which Sakurai had conceived at the age of nineteen and completed by the time of its April 1992 Game Boy launch, — just weeks before the bankruptcy filing. Its sequel, Kirby's Adventure for the Famicom, arrived in 1993 and sold more than 1.75 million copies worldwide, becoming exactly the kind of commercial anchor the company needed. Iwata kept his promise: the debt was fully repaid in 1999, on schedule.

The years between the bankruptcy and the debt's repayment were also the years in which HAL reached genuine creative maturity. Iwata and Sakurai collaborated on MOTHER 2: Giygas Strikes Back (released internationally as EarthBound) in 1994, co-developed with Ape Inc. — a project where Iwata famously stepped in to rescue a foundering codebase and rebuilt critical sections of the program in a matter of months. Then, in 1998, the two men embarked on perhaps their most audacious project: working nights and weekends, entirely in secret, they built a prototype fighting game using no Nintendo IP at all, calling it Dragon King: The Fighting Game. When they finally showed it to Nintendo management, the response was immediate. With Nintendo characters added to the roster, the game became Super Smash Bros., released in Japan on January 21, 1999 — a million-seller at home and the beginning of one of gaming's most enduring franchises.

By the turn of the millennium, HAL's two defining figures had both moved on from the studio, carrying its legacy into new institutions. Satoru Iwata transferred to Nintendo in 2000 as head of corporate planning, and in May 2002 he became the company's fourth president — the first person outside the Yamauchi family to hold the position. Masahiro Sakurai departed HAL in August 2003, unwilling to spend the rest of his career producing sequels on demand, and eventually established his own company, Sora Ltd., in September 2005. The losses were immense in terms of talent, but HAL had by this point built something durable: a pipeline of franchises, a skilled second generation of creators, and a relationship with Nintendo that had grown from contractor to trusted creative partner. Super Smash Bros. Melee, released for the GameCube in 2001 and the last Smash title developed directly by HAL, sold more than seven million copies — the highest-selling GameCube software of all time.

In the decades since, HAL has continued to define its identity through the Kirby franchise above all others. Shinya Kumazaki, who joined the company in 2002 and became a director in 2021, has led the series into bold new territory: Kirby and the Forgotten Land (2022) marked the franchise's first fully three-dimensional adventure and sold approximately eight million copies, the best-performing entry in the series' history. HAL also participates in the broader Nintendo ecosystem through its joint venture Warpstar, Inc. — established in July 2001 to manage Kirby's global merchandising — though in April 2025 Nintendo acquired HAL's fifty-percent stake to make Warpstar a wholly owned subsidiary, subsequently renamed Nintendo Stars Inc. in August 2025. Today, operating from its Yamanashi development center and from within Nintendo's Tokyo building, HAL Laboratory employs around 242 people. The studio that nearly vanished under a mountain of debt in 1992 has become one of the most stable and beloved creative institutions in Japanese game development — a testament to the choices made by the people who refused to let it die.