Director Sakurai Shares Footage Of Early Smash Bros Prototype

Image for article titled Super Smash Bros. Director Shares Footage Of Early Prototype That Inspired The Series

In case you missed it, Super Smash Bros.’ Masahiro Sakurai has a implausible YouTube channel now the place he shares every kind of cool concepts and tales about video games growth. Example: in his newest video, he has proven off footage of Dragon King: The Fighting Game, a prototype preventing sport that might pave the way in which for nice issues.

While information of the sport’s existence is nothing new—it’s been reported on just a few instances, is thought amongst critical Nintendo and Smash Bros. historians and a few blurry outdated screenshots have circulated—we’ve by no means really seen it in motion earlier than, so getting such a very good take a look at it right here (and from the supply, no much less!) is wonderful.

Dragon King’s prototype—which dates again to 1996—was labored on by each Sakurai and Satoru Iwata whereas each have been at HAL Laboratory, and because the video explains was pitched to Nintendo as a standalone sport earlier than finally turning into {the catalogue}-spanning Smash Bros. sequence we all know at the moment.

You can immediately see how Smash advanced from this pitch for a “four-player free-for-all fighting game with no health bars”; whereas these are simply clean colored characters, not the Nintendo cameos we’re used to, virtually every part else is Smash Bros. to the core, from the digital camera actions to the variety of gamers to the injury share.

Perhaps most fascinating, although, are his recollections about how the sequence got here to be recognized for these cameos. Sakurai says that the concept of beginning a brand new preventing sport from scratch, and having to provide you with 8-12 characters that might be unfamiliar to gamers, wasn’t nice, so he managed to persuade Nintendo to let him “borrow their most popular characters” as an alternative, even when this transfer was wildly unpopular with the corporate’s fits on the time, who strongly opposed “the idea of having Nintendo’s characters beat each other up”.

G/O Media could get a fee