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Twenty years ago this month, the original Super Smash Bros. had been launched on Nintendo 64 in North America. Needless to say how important this game would be for Nintendo's fortune. The mascot's brawler will eventually become one of the company's most appreciated and lavish franchises, selling millions of copies and inspiring a series of imitators on other platforms. forms. But despite all the famous characters attached to the game, the risk was also great for Nintendo, a curious experience in a genre he knew little, and its eventual success was far from assured.
At the moment of the arrival of Super Smash Bros. in 1999, Nintendo already knew his mascot characters very well in seemingly incongruous genres. The company's workhorse, Mario, had already played in more offside games than in platform games, ranging from puzzle to runner, and it was certainly not the only one; Kirby had a similar predilection for jumping in genres, appearing in his own interpretations of Pinball, Breakout and even Minigolf, while the Pokemon series would continue to inspire a series of his own games drawn after his explosive start.
Super Smash Bros. N64, however, differs significantly from other products in a significant way: it is the first time that these disparate characters appear together in the same game. If its composition may seem strange compared to current standards, at the time, it was a real distribution of Nintendo's mascots. Of course, Mario figured prominently in the ads and on the box of the game, but he now shared the spotlight with Link, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Yoshi and even some relatively obscure characters like EarthBound's Ness and Captain Falcon F-Zero, representing a sample of the company's largest franchises.
Few games at the time attempted to gather as many properties under a single banner, thus giving Super Smash Bros. the look of a large – scale crossover event. However, this has not always been considered as such. The game was originally released under the code name "Kakuto-Geemu Ryuoh", a side project in which Kirby's creator Masahiro Sakurai and HAL programmer (and future president of Nintendo), the late Satoru Iwata, collaborated. during their free time. From the beginning, Sakurai wanted the project to offer a different kind of experience from other combat games on the market, with a focus on free four-player orders and easy-to-learn controls.
When the time came to replace the generic fighters of the game by real actors, Sakurai asked to use characters from the vast stable of Nintendo's mascots, but the idea was initially unwelcome. "Nowadays, we take this for granted, but at the time, people had reservations about mobilizing a troupe of characters," Iwata recalled during an interview with Sakurai. in 2008. "I suppose the fans were upset at the prospect of confronting characters like Mario, Link and Pikachu, and we had a hard time convincing them of the pleasure and depth that was so obviously present in the fighting style of the brand Smash Bros. "
Super Smash Bros: A Look At The Evolution Of The Series
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In spite of this hesitation, Sakurai 's instinct is revealed to be accurate and Super Smash Bros. was going to become one of the N64's best-selling discs, thanks largely to its star formation. The diversity of fighters has given the game a cross appeal that many other Nintendo spinoffs lacked. While Mario's sports outings inherently attracted those who were already fans of the plumber, Super Smash Bros. seduced everyone who had ever played a Nintendo game, be it Zelda, Donkey Kong or Pokemon. In addition, it allowed hilarious confrontations, never possible before, adding to the novelty. It was an official game on Nintendo where players could shoot Pikachu in the face using a ray gun or knock Yoshi with a hammer and fly it in the background.
This certainly helped the title be easy to take and play too. Sakurai's work as a game designer has long been characterized by its accessibility. With Smash Bros., he applied this same sensitivity to what was traditionally an inaccessible genre. While most contemporary fighting games required players to memorize complex input chains to make combos, Smash emphasized simplicity, linking the complete repertoire of attacks of each two-button character. and a directional inclination. This configuration was still sufficiently nuanced to allow advanced players to play, but even those who had never proved their skill for fighting games could seize the title and join the fray with relatively relative ease. The stages on which these fights were fought also contributed to the unpredictability, each with its own unique dangers that players had to deal with carefully during the fighting.
Super Smash Bros. would sell more than five million copies in the world. While it was not enough to reverse the N64's fortune against Sony's PlayStation, an insurgent, this helped boost the system's reputation as a party machine. More importantly, he laid the groundwork for even more ambitious projects. While the original game was a commercial success in its own right, the series would not really explode in popularity as its sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee, did not arrive two years later on the brand new GameCube. And the franchise only continued to grow from there, with each successive installment introducing more fighters, game modes, music, and other content until each game became a spectacle in itself.
All these advances would finally lead to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for Switch, which is by far the biggest opus of the series to date, canceling the modest composition of the original 12-character with over 70 playable fighters. Despite its launch last December, Ultimate has already become the franchise's best-selling game, with over 13 million copies sold in four months – a testament to the series' enduring appeal two decades later. its launch. If the Super Smash Bros. Originals may seem obsolete compared to the games that will follow, we will always remember him for launching one of Nintendo's most popular and lucrative franchises, and that would not have been possible if two Visionary designers had been working on a strange little experiment in their free time 20 years ago.