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In case you missed it, Super Smash Bros.’ Masahiro Sakurai has a fantastic YouTube channel now where he shares all kinds of cool ideas and stories about games development. Instance: in his newest video, he has proven off footage of Dragon King: The Combating Recreation, a prototype preventing recreation that may pave the way in which for nice issues.
Whereas information of the sport’s existence is nothing new—it’s been reported on just a few occasions, is understood amongst critical Nintendo and Smash Bros. historians and a few blurry previous screenshots have circulated—we’ve by no means really seen it in motion earlier than, so getting such have 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 recreation earlier than ultimately changing into {the catalogue}-spanning Smash Bros. sequence we all know as we speak.
You may immediately see how Smash advanced from this pitch for a “four-player free-for-all preventing recreation with no well being bars”; whereas these are simply clean colored characters, not the Nintendo cameos we’re used to, nearly all the things else is Smash Bros. to the core, from the digicam actions to the variety of gamers to the injury share.
Maybe most attention-grabbing, although, are his recollections about how the sequence got here to be recognized for these cameos. Sakurai says that the thought of beginning a brand new preventing recreation from scratch, and having to give you 8-12 characters that may be unfamiliar to gamers, wasn’t nice, so he managed to persuade Nintendo to let him “borrow their hottest characters” as a substitute, even when this transfer was wildly unpopular with the corporate’s fits on the time, who strongly opposed “the thought of getting Nintendo’s characters beat one another up”.
You can check out Sakurai’s story, and the footage of Dragon King, below.
