Super Smash Bros.

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Smash Bros. is a series of platform fighting games published by Nintendo, and it began as a prototype called Dragon King: The Fighting Game. Only three people built that prototype. Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the series, handled planning, design, graphics, modeling and animation. A third developer made the audio. Satoru Iwata wrote the programming, and because he was leading another project at the time, he did the work on weekends. Dragon King contained no crossover elements at all. From that small start grew a series featuring characters from many Nintendo franchises and from other developers' games, with more than 77 million units sold combined. How did that prototype end up borrowing Nintendo's biggest stars? Why does winning mean knocking opponents off the stage rather than emptying a life bar? And why has the series' most devoted community so often clashed with the company behind it?

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• 2. Asking Permission

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  Two pitches reached Nintendo from Masahiro Sakurai after he finished Kirby Super Star in 1996. He worked at HAL Laboratory and wanted to experiment with 3D graphics and animation on the new Nintendo 64. The first pitch was a four-player free-for-all fighting game. The second was a stealth game in which a remote-controlled robot hacked security cameras to progress through levels. Nintendo praised both. HAL, however, was already building several other Nintendo 64 games, including Mother 3, and could not start either one. Then those other projects were cancelled, and the studio needed a finished game as quickly as possible. Sakurai judged that the fighting prototype would take less time, so it won.

  Satoru Iwata had his own reason for joining in. He wanted to make a four-player game that took advantage of the three-dimensional joystick on the Nintendo 64 controller.

  Sakurai had doubts about filling the game with original fighters. He argued that fighting games had too many "main characters" competing for marketing attention, and that this made players care less. Arcade games could get away with it, he said. Home consoles were different, because the game world's "atmosphere" had to be established immediately. He did not want newcomers to face a large roster of strangers. So he asked Nintendo for permission to use its own characters.

  Shigeru Miyamoto rejected the idea. Sakurai and Iwata responded by building a demo starring Mario, Fox McCloud, Samus Aran and Donkey Kong, and they made sure it was well balanced before presenting it again. This time Miyamoto gave his permission.

  The finished game divided opinion inside the company. Many other developers reacted positively, but Nintendo's sales team did not want the company's characters fighting each other. Iwata proposed the word "brothers" for the title, to signal that the characters "weren't simply fighting" but "were friends who were settling a little disagreement." That is how it became Super Smash Bros. It reached Japan on the 21st of January 1999 and North America on the 26th of April 1999.

  Sakurai also launched a website called "Smash Bros. Dojo!!" to teach strategies and techniques to players raised on traditional fighting games. Those players would need the lessons, because the rules inside the game worked differently from anything they knew.

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• 3. Damage Over Health Bars

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  Sakurai's complaint about the fighting games of his day was that they had grown too complex. Combos dominated play and shrank the role of strategy. He wanted more room for improvisation and interplay between players. His answer was a system of accumulated damage, so that each attack demanded a different reaction instead of simply draining the other player's life bar. While searching for ways to use the Nintendo 64 joystick, he also created "smash attacks", triggered by a more aggressive "flick" of the stick.

  A rising percentage value beside each character tells the story of a match. The higher it climbs, the farther attacks send that character flying. Players lose a life when they are launched past the stage boundaries. Before that happens, they can try to "recover" with midair jumps and special abilities. Their opponents can "edge-guard" to stop them from returning.

  Controls are deliberately simple, with one button for standard attacks and a second for special attacks. The direction of the analog stick changes the move, and so does being in the air. Every character has three smash attacks, for side, up and down, plus five aerial attacks. Holding the attack button charges a smash attack and makes it stronger.

  Defense follows its own logic. A shield blocks attacks, but it weakens over time and breaks if it absorbs too much damage, leaving its user vulnerable. Dodges grant brief invulnerability, even in midair, though they leave a character exposed once they end. In some games, a directional air dodge used while landing starts a "wavedash". Shielding with perfect timing parries an attack. Shields cannot stop grabs, and a grab can throw an opponent in any of four directions. Attacking, shielding and grabbing therefore form a rock-paper-scissors loop.

  Starting with Brawl, characters can unleash a "Final Smash", an extremely powerful attack. A character earns one by breaking a floating "Smash Ball" or by filling a charge meter over time.

  Items appear at random onstage when they are enabled, and many borrow from other games. The Super Mushroom from the Super Mario series makes a character grow. The Super Scope, based on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System accessory, fires projectiles. Other items heal damage. Poké Balls summon Pokémon, and Brawl added "Assist Trophies" that call in characters from other franchises.

  Matches originally held up to four players. In Smash for Wii U and Ultimate, the limit rises to eight, and computer-controlled players can fill empty spots. The most common rules are "Time" and "Stock". In Time matches, a fixed clock runs and players gain points for knockouts and lose them for being knocked out. In Stock matches, each player has a finite number of lives, and the last one standing wins. A rarer "Stamina" mode gives players health that eliminates them at zero.

  "Final Destination" and "Battlefield" are stages original to the series, although most stages are based on other video games. Some are flat planes with no edges. Others add hazards, such as boss fights against the Yellow Devil from the Mega Man series or Ridley from Metroid.

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• 4. Two Demanding Sequels

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  In May 1999, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, Sakurai privately revealed that he was making a sequel for the upcoming Nintendo GameCube. The design plan was finished on the 5th of July 1999. HAL Laboratory returned to develop it, assisted by other studios including Creatures Inc. By May 2001, over 50 people were actively working on the game, and over 100 had been involved at some point. The name Super Smash Bros. Melee was made official at E3 2001, seven months before its North American release. The GameCube was more powerful and easier to develop for than the Nintendo 64, so Melee added 14 new characters and many more modes.

  Development took only 13 months, and Sakurai called his lifestyle during that time "destructive". He took no holidays and only short breaks on weekends. He described it as the "biggest project he had ever led up to that point." The GameCube still could not handle features such as eight-player matches. To fit in more Nintendo characters than could be built as fighters, the team introduced collectible "trophies", which were 3D models. Sakurai aimed Melee at people "well-versed in video games", and the physics system was heavily revised. HAL worked with three computer graphics studios in Tokyo to finish full-motion video scenes by E3 2001, and Sakurai drew the storyboards himself. Melee reached Japan on the 21st of November 2001 and North America on the 3rd of December 2001.

  Iwata's announcement at a May 2005 press conference caught Sakurai off guard. Iwata had become Nintendo's president, and he said a new Smash game was coming for the Wii with online play over the console's Wi-Fi. Sakurai had left HAL Laboratory in 2003 and had heard nothing about it. Nintendo had polled many people, who wanted a new Smash game with online play, even though planning had not begun. Iwata then asked Sakurai to make it, adding that Nintendo would otherwise port Melee to the Wii with online functions. Sakurai accepted and finished the planning document in July 2005.

  HAL's former Smash team was busy with another project, so Sakurai gathered a new team that included staff from the studio Game Arts. His own company, Sora Ltd., was also involved. More than 100 people worked full time on Brawl, and over 700 contributed in all. Sakurai wanted a lengthy single-player story mode, and he worked on its storyline with Kazushige Nojima, who had written scenarios for several Final Fantasy games. The Wii targeted more casual players and used the Wii Remote, so Sakurai made Brawl considerably slower than Melee. It was also the first game in the series to be playtested, by a small team of four.

  Solid Snake from Konami's Metal Gear and Sonic from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog became the first playable third-party fighters. Snake appeared in the E3 2006 trailer, and Sonic was announced in October 2007 on the Dojo website. Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka had both asked Sakurai to include their characters in Melee, but time ran out. Sakurai gave each a "distinct feel" yet said he did not consciously treat them differently from Nintendo characters. Brawl's roster reached 35 playable characters, with 15 of them new.

  Brawl arrived in Japan on the 31st of January 2008 and in North America on the 9th of March 2008. Nintendo had promised December 2007, then pushed the date back two months before that launch. The cutscenes made for its story mode would soon prompt a decision about the next game.

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• 5. From Handheld to Switch

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  At E3 in June 2011, Iwata announced that Sakurai would make a Smash game for both the Nintendo 3DS handheld and the Wii U console, with the two versions connecting to each other. Sakurai was busy with Kid Icarus Uprising, so real work began only after that game came out in 2012. Sora Ltd. built the game alongside Bandai Namco Studios, and staff from the studio's Tekken and Soulcalibur games joined the team. A Nintendo Direct presentation at E3 2013 formally revealed Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, nicknamed Smash 4.

  Sakurai felt that Brawl's cutscenes could not affect players as he wished, because they were shared so widely online. Smash 4 therefore had no story mode and no cutscenes. The animation resources went into computer-generated "fighter reveal videos" that announced new characters online, a practice that continued in later games. He aimed for a speed between Melee and Brawl. Both versions share the same characters, movesets and items, though each has exclusive stages. The 3DS could not handle characters that transform mid-match, such as the Pokémon Trainer or Princess Zelda and Sheik, or the Ice Climbers, who act as two characters at once. Parity meant they appeared in neither version. The two games lack cross-platform play, but players can transfer data, including customized characters.

  The 3DS version came out in Japan on the 13th of September 2014 and in North America on the 3rd of October 2014. The Wii U version launched in North America on the 21st of November 2014 and in Japan on the 6th of December 2014. Smash 4 became the series' first game with paid downloadable content, sold individually as characters, stages and outfits for Mii fighters. Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates and Bayonetta from Bayonetta were the last DLC characters, released on the 3rd of February 2016. In total, Smash 4 offered 56 characters, 19 of them new.

  Iwata asked Sakurai to direct a Smash game for the Nintendo Switch before the console was publicly announced. Sakurai said it was the last request he received from Iwata before his death in July 2015. He finished the proposal document on the 16th of December 2015. Active development began in February 2016, once all the Smash 4 downloadable content was out. Bandai Namco Studios returned to assist Sora Ltd. The Wii U and Switch hardware were similar, which eased the work. Earlier games had each been made by teams assembled from scratch.

  An easier transition led Sakurai to propose that the Switch game include every playable character from the whole series, and doing so became a major goal. He dropped plans to change gameplay between TV and handheld modes, because the handheld screen was good enough. He raised the speed again past Smash 4 but kept it below Melee. Time constraints ruled out a Brawl-style story mode and a large set of trophies, which had grown expensive to make. Sakurai conceived "Spirits" to replace the trophies. He kept the story mode involved, though less so than Brawl's, and again storyboarded it himself.

  A March 2018 Nintendo Direct teased the game, and E3 2018, three months later, revealed it as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It launched worldwide on the 7th of December 2018. A "Fighters Pass" of five extra characters had been announced before release. In January 2020, Nintendo revealed Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses as the last character in that pass, and announced a second pass with six more. Sora of Kingdom Hearts arrived in October 2021 as the final character. Balance patches continued until December 2021, and minor updates ran until 2024.

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• 6. Modes, Music and Merchandise

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  In the Home-Run Contest, players hit a sandbag with the Home-Run Bat item and try to launch it as far as possible. In Break the Targets, a character's abilities carry it through a course to smash every target. Courses were character-specific in Melee but open to all characters in Brawl. Smash 4 added "Target Blast", where a single bomb must destroy as many targets as possible. The first game offered "Board the Platforms", a race to land on floating platforms along a course unique to each character. Many of these side modes allow two-player co-operative play.

  "Multi-Man Smash" groups modes in which one player battles many opponents. In "100-Man Smash", the goal is to defeat 100 of them. In "Cruel Smash", the opponents are extremely strong, and the goal is to beat as many as possible. Since Brawl, players can build custom stages and share them online. The Wii U version of Smash 4 included a board game mode called "Smash Tour". The 3DS version had "Smash Run", in which players explore a large map to collect power-ups before a final battle. Ultimate introduced "Squad Strike", where players swap characters after each life.

  "Classic Mode" strings together a series of battles against opponents who are based on the player's character, preset, or randomly generated, depending on the game. It can include Break the Targets, a platforming challenge or a bonus stage. It ends with a fight against Master Hand or another boss. "All-Star Mode" asks players to defeat every character in the game, and "Event Matches" offer themed battles.

  Melee's campaign, "Adventure Mode", mixed platforming levels with battles based on various game series. Brawl's "Subspace Emissary" was far larger. It combined platforming levels, boss fights and battles with cutscenes that included every character. Ultimate's "World of Light" dropped platforming. Players instead fought Spirits, playable characters and bosses scattered across an overworld, and used role-playing elements such as a skill tree to upgrade characters. The Spirits themselves are 2D images, and each requires a battle whose conditions reference that Spirit's character. Collected Spirits can be attached to a fighter to boost attributes or grant abilities such as an extra midair jump.

  Online multiplayer has been part of the series since Brawl. Smash 4 split it into "For Fun" and "For Glory", with rules aimed at casual and competitive players respectively. In Ultimate, ranked battles earn "Global Smash Power", and passing a threshold opens "Elite Smash".

  Over 80 fighters have appeared across the series. Smash 4 let players customize existing fighters with altered movesets and abilities. It also introduced Mii fighters, who can be given three different fighting styles. Non-playable characters take the form of enemies, bosses and summonable power-up items.

  Hirokazu Ando composed the music for the Nintendo 64 game and later returned as sound and music director for Melee. Tadashi Ikegami, Shougo Sakai and Takuto Kitsuta also wrote Melee tracks. Brawl drew on 38 contracted composers, and Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu wrote its main theme. Ultimate had over 800 composers and arrangers in all. Through the "My Music" feature, players can choose and listen to tracks, and the 3DS and Switch games play music from the sound menu while the system sleeps or is in handheld mode.

  Three soundtrack albums exist. Teichiku Records released the original music from the first game in Japan in 2000. In 2003, Nintendo released Smashing...Live!, an orchestral performance of Melee pieces by the New Japan Philharmonic. A two-disc promotional set, A Smashing Soundtrack, went to Club Nintendo members who registered both the 3DS and Wii U games between the 21st of November 2014 and the 13th of January 2015.

  Merchandise for the series is generally prohibited, apart from free giveaways and limited edition items. Amiibo figures are the main exception. They debuted alongside Smash for Wii U, and Nintendo made one for every character in Smash 4 and Ultimate. The line ended in February 2024 with the Sora figure. Using near-field communication, an Amiibo can be trained in-game as a computer player that gains experience points and levels up as it fights.

  Nintendo also released new GameCube controllers, with adapters for the Wii U and Switch, to coincide with Smash 4 and Ultimate. Before Ultimate's release came a limited edition Switch whose dock showed the game's characters and whose Joy-Con controllers bore the series logo. The game was also bundled with a Smash-themed Pro Controller and a steelbook case.

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• 7. Community Versus Company

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  A significant competitive community took shape in 2002, after the release of Melee, even though a few tournaments had run around the first game. Grassroots efforts built it, with no official backing from Nintendo. Websites such as Smashboards, a forum created to discuss the series before Melee came out, helped it unite. In 2004, Major League Gaming began hosting Melee esports competitions and created a tournament circuit. That began the "Golden Age of Melee", and players such as Ken Hoang became well known. MLG ended the circuit in 2007 when Brawl arrived. Brawl's changes aimed at casual players, though, made it less popular with competitors, and the community gradually drifted back to Melee.

  In 2013, Melee fans rallied to get the game into the Evolution Championship Series, or EVO, an annual fighting game tournament. Nintendo intervened and tried to cancel the Melee event, but after significant backlash it let the tournament proceed. Joseph "Mang0" Marquez won. He had first broken out at EVO 2007, finishing third at what was the last EVO to feature a Smash game. Later in 2013, Travis Beauchamp released The Smash Brothers, a documentary series on Melee's competitive history at MLG and EVO events. It helped Melee overtake Brawl in competitive popularity. The film arrived while five players, called Melee's "Five Gods", dominated tournaments: Marquez, Jason "Mew2King" Zimmerman, Juan "Hungrybox" DeBiedma, Adam "Armada" Lindgren and Kevin "PPMD" Nanney.

  Melee returned to EVO 2014. Brawl appeared in qualifying events but was left out of the final tournament. Hoping to profit from renewed interest, Nintendo held an invitational for the upcoming Smash for Wii U at E3 2014, with top Melee and Brawl players. Gonzalo "ZeRo" Barrios, then among the best Brawl players, won it. He went on to win 55 consecutive tournaments in Smash 4's first year, until Nairoby "Nairo" Quezada beat him in October 2015. In 2016, Genesis 3 and EVO 2016 drew more entrants than any earlier Smash competitions.

  William "Leffen" Hjelte began to challenge the Five Gods in 2016. In 2018, Justin "Plup" McGrath won the Melee tournament at Genesis 5, and Hjelte declared it the end of their era. Earlier that year, Barrios had retired from competitive Smash 4 to focus on livestreaming. Leonardo "MKLeo" López Pérez was the top-ranked Smash 4 player when Ultimate launched in 2018. Ultimate drew a large audience, including Melee players unhappy with Brawl and Smash 4. López Pérez defeated Gavin "Tweek" Dempsey to win EVO 2019, then the largest Smash tournament ever held.

  The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled many tournaments, and Ultimate was cut from EVO 2020. After Sony Interactive Entertainment bought EVO in 2021, Nintendo chose not to bring Smash back. In mid-2020, during the #MeToo movement, a wave of sexual misconduct allegations hit competitive players, including prominent figures. Nintendo called the alleged acts "absolutely impermissible", which widened rifts with the community. Later in 2020, Nintendo ordered The Big House to cancel its Melee tournament for using Slippi, an unofficial mod that adds online multiplayer, and fans started the #FreeMelee movement in protest. Nintendo hosted esports events for Splatoon and Arms (2017) while offering Smash little support, so its tournaments have much lower prize pools than other major esports.

  In late 2021, Nintendo partnered with the esports organization Panda Global on the Panda Cup, a 2022 circuit for Ultimate and Melee. Many saw it as a sign that Nintendo would engage more with the community. In December 2022, the rival Smash World Tour said it would cancel its 2022 finale and 2023 circuit at Nintendo's request. Nintendo denied making the request and rejected the Tour's claim that Panda had tried to undermine it. Panda removed Alan Bunney as CEO and postponed its Panda Cup finale indefinitely. Every professional Smash player affiliated with the organization then left.

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• 8. Acclaim and Imitators

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  Nintendo Power listed the first game among the greatest multiplayer experiences in Nintendo history and called it infinitely replayable. Critics did fault its scoring as hard to follow, and its single-player mode as difficult and thin. Reviews of the series have generally been positive, with multiplayer praised in every game and single-player modes less consistently.

  Reviewers welcomed how Melee expanded on the first game's features. GameSpy said Melee "really scores big in the 'we've added tons of great extra stuff' department." IGN's Fran Mirabella III placed it "in an entirely different league than the N64 version." GameSpot's Miguel Lopez praised its advanced classic mode but called Adventure Mode "really a hit-or-miss experience." GameSpy also wrote that "you'll have a pretty hard time finding a more enjoyable multiplayer experience on any other console."

  Brawl earned a perfect score from the Japanese magazine Famitsu. Chris Slate of Nintendo Power gave it a perfect score in the March 2008 issue, calling it "one of the very best games that Nintendo has ever produced." IGN's Matt Casamassina still pointed to "long loading times" and repetition in The Subspace Emissary. The 3DS and Wii U games of Smash 4 scored 85/100 and 92/100 on Metacritic. Critics criticized the 3DS version's small characters on its screen and its latency in local and online play. There were also reports of players damaging their 3DS Circle Pads through heavy play.

  Sales matched the praise. The first game sold 1.4 million copies in Japan and 2.3 million in the United States, with 5.55 million worldwide. Melee sold over 7 million and became the best-selling GameCube game. Brawl sold 1.524 million in Japan and 1.4 million in its first week in the United States, making it Nintendo of America's fastest-selling game at that point. The 3DS version sold over a million copies in its first Japanese weekend and more than 9.63 million worldwide. The Wii U version sold 3.39 million in two months, beating Mario Kart 8's record for the console, and reached 5.38 million by September 2021.

  Ultimate set new highs for the series and the Switch, selling an estimated 5.6 million copies worldwide in its first week. In Japan, it sold 2.6 million in five weeks, outpacing the 3DS game. As of the 31st of March 2025, it had sold 36.24 million copies. That makes it the third best-selling Switch game and the best-selling fighting game of all time.

  Smash is often credited with popularizing the platform fighter, a subgenre built on ground movement and knocking characters into blast zones through accumulating damage percentages. From the mid-2010s, independent developers made their own versions. Rivals of Aether (2017) took its faster, skill-based pace from Melee, according to lead designer Dan Fornace, a former competitive Smash player. Brawlhalla and Brawlout, both from 2017, drew favorable comparisons as well.

  The crossover idea spread too. Sony Computer Entertainment published PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale in 2012 for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl added separate light and heavy attacks, like those in traditional fighting games. MultiVersus reached early access in 2022 and a wide release in 2024, drawing on Warner Bros. film and television franchises. Despite decent reception, such rivals have generally been seen as inferior substitutes. Even Brawlhalla and Rivals of Aether now borrow Smash's habit of welcoming guest fighters from other publishers.

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