HAL Laboratory

From Kirby Wiki

HAL Laboratory, Inc. (株式会社ハル研究所, Kabushikigaisha Haru Kenkyūjo?) is a Japanese video game developer that was founded on February 21, 1980.

Its name comes from the HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The company is most famous for its character Kirby, the protagonist of the eponymous game series, as well as the Super Smash Bros. Series. It is a second-party development studio of Nintendo.

HAL Laboratory started off making games for the MSX system and the Commodore VIC-20. During the early 1980s, some of their games since the 1986 Famicom Disk System game Gall Force (based on the anime series of the same name) have been released also on Nintendo systems.

In many of its games during the early to mid-'90s it used the name HALKEN (derived from their literal Japanese name "HAL KENkyūjo")as well as HAL Laboratory. Some of its early titles were also released as HAL America, a North American subsidiary of the company. At the time, HALKEN has two variations of its logo: one of them was the Wakaba mark. It's strange that they used this mark because this mark is used to represent new drivers.

An important figure of HAL Laboratory is Masahiro Sakurai, who created the Kirby character and the Super Smash Bros. franchise, and now leads his own company, Sora Ltd.

[edit] Trivia

The current president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, was a former president of HAL.

Both the Wataba Mark and the current logo are in the Paint Panic subgame.