For many, HAL Laboratory is just the studio behind the Kirby games but there's more to this company than first appears. I was lucky enough to catch up with the studio's president Satoshi Mitsuhara and find out what makes HAL Laboratory so special. Mitsuhara has had a long and eventful career in gaming but how he got into games is very interesting. Especially as he started out as a programmer but not out of mathematical interesting, but something more mechanical. "I grew up in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It was the countryside so you could say I grew up surrounded by nature. In those days, the source of information in areas like this was just TV and radio. That meant whatever was happening in more cosmopolitan areas, I was a long way from that covered in mud. "I used to really enjoy playing with radio-controlled cars when I was younger, so I think that lead up to working with computers in a way.