HAL Laboratory

HAL Laboratory, Inc.
Company type	Private; (subsidary of Nintendo)
Industry	Video game industry
Founded	February 21, 1980
Headquarters	Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
Key people	Satoru Iwata (former president); Masahiro Sakurai
Products	Video games
Number of employees	110
Website	http://www.hallab.co.jp/

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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.

The current president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, was a former president of HAL. Other important figures include Masahiro Sakurai, who created the Kirby character and the Super Smash Bros. franchise, and now leads his own company, Sora Ltd.