Since the original game on Nintendo 64, every home Nintendo console has had a Super Smash Bros. game. At this point, the series is almost as expected and hyped as the next mainline Mario or Zelda game. So, when the Wii was announced back in 2005, many were expecting a new Smash game. Nintendo delivered with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which received universal praise and massive sales. However, that game wasn’t always going to happen, at least according to series director Masahiro Sakuraiย in a recent video on his personal YouTube channel.
As first spotted by Eurogamer, Sakurai recently dropped a video in his “Game Concepts” series on YouTube. There, he talks about how he went freelance from Nintendo following the release of Smash Bros. Melee on Gamecube. After the Wii’s announcement, he was approached by then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata about creating the next game in the series. It seems that Sakurai was a little hesitant at first and Iwata told him that if he wasn’t up to it, Nintendo would simply release a straight port of Melee onto the Wii in place of a brand-new game.ย
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Obviously, that didn’t happen and Nintendo fans were treated to one of the series’ best installments. However, it is fun to imagine a world in which Brawl never came out. Without a new game on the Wii, would Smash Bros. have continued to dominate sales charts for years to come? It’s impossible to know, but given how well Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is doing on the Switch, it stands to reason that Melee could’ve done something similar on the Wii.
The bigger question is would Sakurai have come back for future installments if he’d skipped this one? Again, we can’t know the answer to that, but it certainly wouldn’t have been a surprise if he had ditched the franchise altogether. Thankfully for Smash fans, he didn’t and we’re still getting games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimateย that build on the foundations set all those years ago, giving fans the ultimate way to mash together all their favorite franchises in platform-fighting heaven.
