In the latest video on his popular YouTube channel, Masahiro Sakurai revealed the history and secrets of making Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64.
In 1996, after finishing work on Kirby Super Star for the SNES, Sakurai set to work on two video game prototypes. He had just started fiddling with a Silicon Graphics machine and the program Softimage, learning to create games with 3D graphics. Nintendo’s upcoming console the Nintendo 64, itself, also ran on computers developed by Silicon Graphics, so developers of Nintendo games were pushed forward to learning to use these machines to make Nintendo 64 games.
One prototype was described as a four-player free-for-all fighting game with no health bars. The other was a stealth and exploration RC robot adventure game where you hacked into security cameras. While Sakurai, at that point still an employee at HAL, worked on the design, graphics, 3D modeling, and animation, the late Satoru Iwata, at this point now the CEO at HAL, took time out from that job to do programming for both games.
At this point in development, HAL hadn’t settled on using Nintendo characters, and so the prototype was called Dragon King: The Fighting Game. Sakurai shared never before seen footage of the prototype in action, and as you can see from the video, he had more or less already settled on the design for Super Smash Bros. The key elements that were already decided on at this point where Smash attacks, mid-air jumps, grabs, shields, dashes, and aerial attacks that could go in any of five directions. You can see a screengrab from this footage below.
Both prototypes were very popular within Nintendo, but HAL Laboratory could not commit to making both. At this point, the company was already working on many games for the Nintendo 64 themselves. One was the ill-fated Mother 3, which was going to run on the Nintendo 64’s hard drive peripheral, the 64DD. Others, including an earlier version of Kirby Air Ride, were ultimately cancelled before they were revealed to the public.
HAL was stuck in a situation where they needed to get a game quickly to make up for the lost effort on the cancelled games, and this was when they decided to finish the fighting game.
Sakurai also takes the time to address the common notion that Super Smash Bros is not a fighting game. While some fighting gamers derisively refer to Super Smash Bros as a party game, Sakurai himself describes it as the antithesis to fighting games. Sakurai explains that he observed how the fighting game genre was evolving, and in particular disagreed with how combos were swaying the way fighting games were going. While pulling off fighting game combos requires physical and mental skill, and some analytical thinking to use effectively, Sakurai sees that they also eroded the possibility that players could use any strategy, other than using combos. As he had observed, many players would find themselves just losing out to people who learned combos, which was a smaller set of the total number of fighting game players themselves.
So from the very beginning, Super Smash Bros was designed to allow players more room to improvise and come up with their own strategies. Instead of a health bar, characters in Super Smash Bros accumulated damage. Different attacks have different effects, and you’ll note that many Smash attacks deliberately throw enemies away. The lose condition was shifted from taking too much damage to getting knocked off the screen. Sakurai also explained that Super Smash Bros ‘control scheme was designed all around getting away from the growing complicated inputs of 2D fighting games as seen in the likes of King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown. It should be noted 3D fighting games of this time, like Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive also opted for simplified control schemes.
In regards to using Nintendo characters, this was not a popular idea with Nintendo’s marketing department. Sakurai observed that in the arcades, fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat presented players with multiple playable characters, that could look like main characters. Because of the nature of the arcade setting, players could rapidly be exposed to good players favoring some characters, making them be interested in and care about those characters. Super Smash Bros was not going to arcades, so Sakurai had to find another way to make players care about the characters. Eventually, they asked Nintendo to give them the license to their characters, and that was how this particular franchise was born.
Sakurai ends the video pointing out that the idea of allowing players to choose their rules for Super Smash Bros, whether it was to match the one on one ruleset of other fighting games, or to create their own free-for-alls as Sakurai envisioned it, was also decided in the first game itself. As we all know, high skill Super Smash Bros players would eventually run with that ball to create their own community, in many ways similar to but also often in discord with other fighting game communities. In a way, the existence of the Smash community is simultaneously a repudiation of Sakurai’s vision, and confirmation of his brilliance as a game designer.
You can learn more about the making of Super Smash Bros in its own official Iwata Asks, but in the meantime, watch Sakurai’s video, and see some previously unrevealed footage of Dragon King: The Fighting Game, below.
Source: YouTube
