From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Super Smash Bros. - Of Revelation and Addiction
How a surprising last-second ledge-grab allowed for Nintendo's plucky mascot-mashup to retake the stage and forever reign as king of the hill.

To think that it was right there in front of me the whole time and I almost missed it.

So it was the middle of 1999, and I was desperate to find something to play on my beloved N64. For as much as I enjoyed replaying Banjo-Kazooie, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, THQ's wrestling games, and a few other favorites, I couldn't deny that what I was really hungering for were new experiences. However, the problem remained that I wasn't terribly interested in any of the console's upcoming releases.

Also, because I was too oblivious to realize that the Game Boy Color was an entirely new platform and not a souped-up revision of the classic Game Boy, I didn't consider its games to be worth my time. "The Game Boy had its day," I stated in my ignorance, "and I doubt that the addition of color can do much to camouflage the fact that 8-bit monochrome gaming has long since reached its expiration."

Right around this time, though, a familiar scene started to play out: My brother, James, was about to head out to Electronics Boutique to buy some games for his new PC, and before leaving, he asked me if there were any games that I would like for him to pick up for me while he was there.

In reality, there weren't any because I had no interest in any of the games that were currently available, either.

Yet, as it had always been, I simply couldn't repress my natural inclination to say yes to his offers. Because in every such instance, I felt as though I'd be missing a golden opportunity if I declined the offer. I'd be turning down the chance to get myself new game without having to go out and shop, which I hated doing (and I hadn't yet established credit, so buying games online wasn't an option for me). It just felt wrong to pass up such an opportunity.

So I handed him a wad of cash that totaled somewhere around $120 and told him to pick up Mario Party and Super Smash Bros., which I determined were the safest choices. Because they were, after all, made by Nintendo, whose track record during this period was largely spotless (the only blemish was the pricey, content-deficient Yoshi's Story, which I considered to be an exceptionally weak follow-up to the outstanding Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island).

And from there, it was all a matter of convincing myself that I was making a wise purchasing decision. As soon as James walked out the door, I immediately started doing that. I went into rationalization mode and did whatever I could to make myself believe that it was a good idea to spend over $100 on two games that I didn't know much about.

The results of my introspection were mixed: I could profess to have mild interest in Mario Party because I liked board games in general, but I wasn't able to come up with a justification for purchasing Super Smash Bros., which fit into a genre that typically hovered around the bottom of my list (the only fighting game that I ever really liked was Street Fighter II).

As I thought about the game, I kept recalling the screenshot that I saw in Nintendo Power--the one that depicted Mario fighting Link atop Hyrule Castle--and remembering how indifferent I felt about the concept of Nintendo characters duking it out in fighting game. For whatever reason, the idea just didn't appeal to me.

And honestly, it shouldn't have been that way. I mean, here we had a game in which all of Nintendo's famous mascots were sharing the same space. This was something that I'd been waiting for all my life! It was what my friends and I dreamed about when we were kids!

In that moment, I remembered what we used to do back then: On a summer day, a group of us would go out onto the porch with pens and paper in hand, and then we'd begin drafting ideas for a game in which all of the most popular video-game heroes (Mario, Link, Samus, Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Ryu Hayabusa, et al.) would team up and take on the dark alliance as formed by the equally famous villains (Bowser, Ganon, Mother Brain, Dracula, Dr. Wily, and the rest). And once we completed our document, we'd plan to put it in an envelope and "send it to Nintendo" with the hope that the company would like our idea and decide to run with it. (We'd never actually followed through on our plan, though. We were usually afraid that Nintendo would reject our idea because it was way too wide in scope.)

A game of that nature would be the best thing ever, we felt.

Yet at a time when I was minutes away from owning a game that came very close to that idea, I couldn't have been less interested in playing it.

And that was a shame.

Clearly the game's genre was to blame: Whenever I'd think about a mascot team-up and all of the exciting possibilities that could result from it, I never once seriously entertained the notion that Mario and company should appear together in a fighting game. Because I believed that the genre, by nature, was too limited in scale to act as a platform for an earthshaking, monumental gathering of gaming legends. My expectation, rather, was that the first Nintendo all-star mashup would be an all-encompassing action-adventure game and thus part of a genre would allow it to be large enough in scale to dwarf all of the heroes' respective games combined!

Instead we got Super Smash Bros., a comparatively mundane fighting game. "What a waste!" I thought.

"But hey," I told myself in a consoling manner, "at least I'll have Mario Party, right? Surely its hilariously wacky brand of board-game hijinks will be entertaining enough to make up the difference!"

Well, no. It didn't. In fact, it fell far short of doing so.

Honestly, I couldn't stand Mario Party. It was one of the most annoying and antagonistic games I'd ever played. It wouldn't give me anything. The whole time I was playing it, I kept rolling 1s while the CPU players would never roll anything lower than an 8. I'd never have any coins because I'd continuously land on red spaces. The stars would always spawn on the side of the board that was opposite to where I was currently located and, naturally, close in proximity to the leading CPU player. And during mini-games, the three CPU players would keep teaming up on me and making it impossible for me to win (I didn't win a single mini-game)!

I was aggravated the entire time.

I mean, I was sure that the game was a lot of fun when it was played with other people, but as a single-player game, it was anything but. It provided only an empty, unpleasant experience.

So I immediately shelved it.

I was so done with the game, in fact, that I was able to live happily with the idea of never seeing it again. Had I not been the collecting type, I probably would have sold it back the next day.

So ironically enough, the success of my rationalization now hinged on Super Smash Bros.'s ability to deliver some high-quality, next-level fighting action.

I was nervous about its chances.

I decided that the best way to start my Smash Bros. experience was to mess around in the game's "1P" mode and get a sense of the game's fighting system. And my first impression was that the system was kinda genius. Building up an opponent's percentage to decrease his density so that you could more easily knock him off of the stage was, I thought, a very unique and interesting idea--a "Nintendo-like twist" on a formula if I'd ever seen one--and it worked great in practice.

The main striking mechanic was novel, too. Tilting the analog stick with a different degree of intensity to execute either a light attack or a "Smash Attack" (to term from which the game's name derived) was something I'd never seen before.

The shield mechanics were also notably unique: Holding down either of the shoulder buttons activated a depletable shield that would regenerate when it wasn't in use; and while you were shielding yourself, you gained the ability to pull off some cool evasive maneuvers by pressing left or right on the analog stick!

Otherwise, you could bludgeon your opponent with randomly appearing items, almost all of which were taken directly from the characters' respective games! (The few Smash-exclusive items included those like the lightsaber-inspired Beam Sword and the Home-Run Bat, the latter of which was capable of delivering a one-hit KO when it was swung with maximum force!)

And then there was my favorite aspect of the game: the characters' special moves, which, I excitedly observed, were faithful replications of the trademarked attacks and maneuvers that the characters routinely performed in their own games! And the best part was that each move was mapped to the analog stick in a way that closely reflected the original input (Samus laid bombs with a down-B input, for instance, and executed a Screw Attack with an up-B input)! This, I thought, provided the moves a strong feeling of authenticity.

The characters were replicated so well, in fact, that it really did feel as though they were ripped directly from their respective games!

So Smash Bros. truly was something new and different. It was clearly inspired by the Street Fighter series, whose core mechanics served as the foundation for its engine, yeah, but its wildly distinctive take on the formula enabled it to carve our and occupy its own space.

I didn't really do any research on the game prior to requesting it, so it was my expectation that it was going to be nothing more than a simple Street Fighter II clone with Nintendo characters swapped in, so what I was seeing from it was a welcome surprise. I was happy to see it doing its own thing.

In particular, I loved how Mario and Link translated over to Smash Bros.--how their character models, move-sets, and animations were very close approximations for those that were on display in their latest N64 adventures. They so closely resembled their counterparts from Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that I was convinced that they truly were ripped directly from those games (and simply lowered in polygon-count for technical reasons)!

Their repertoires were expanded to include past abilities (attacks that they performed in their 2D games), and that, to me, made for a fascinating amalgamation of fighting moves. There was just something surreal about seeing a 3D Mario executing a coin-draining Super Jump Punch. Because I didn't expect to ever see that move again. It was absent from Super Mario 64, and that suggested to me that it was an outdated ability and something that a 3D Mario, with all of his advanced attacks and maneuvers, would never need to use.

I greatly appreciated that HAL Labs included these older abilities. I felt that their very presence helped Mario and Link to feel like perfectly concentrated representations of their characters.

The Smash Bros. versions of the characters really were all-embracing: Mario had his classic fireball attack, his spin move from Super Mario World, and all of the acrobatic strikes and maneuvers (performed with the exact same animations) that he could pull off in Super Mario 64 (his move-set even included overlooked attacks like the crouching break-dance kick!). And Link had his trademarked projectile weapons (the boomerang and the big blue bombs), the popular up-and down-thrust moves from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and a collection of sword strikes that were ripped directly from Ocarina of Time.

I didn't really care for HAL's rather middling interpretation of Samus, with whom they took some questionable liberties, but still I felt that the company showed great respect for Nintendo's legacy characters.

I thought it was neat, also, that KOed fighters returned to stages via descending platforms that closely resembled the ones from Mario Bros. It made sense that they did because clearly Smash Bros. had a spiritual connection to Mario Bros. It shared many of Mario Bros.'s values and even played a lot like it. It was basically what Mario Bros. would have evolved into had Nintendo kept it alive and continued to iterate on it.

That was one of Smash Bros. most endearing qualities: It was very up front about where it drew its influence. It was proud to honor the games that inspired its creation.

So from what I could see, the game had all of the ingredients necessary to provide me an amazing fighting-game experience!

Sadly, though, the experience didn't play out like I expected it to. What wound up happening was that I didn't find the game's actual fighting action to be all that exciting.

That's how I felt after I played through the "1P Game" (the game's unimaginatively titled adventure mode) a couple of times.

Honestly, fighting low-IQ CPU characters, most of whom couldn't resist limply self-destructing as they attempted to recover, was kind of a bore. The 2-on-2 and 3-on-1 team battles (in which randomly chosen CPU allies assisted you in your fights against the Mario Bros. and Giant Donkey Kong, respectively) were more interesting, but clashes of their variety were unfortunately limited in number (there were only two of them!). And the final boss being a giant floating hand ("Master Hand," as he was known) was a big letdown.

"Where are Bowser, Ganon and Ridley?" I wondered in a disappointed manner. "Any of those characters would have made for a far more exciting final boss!"

I understood that the giant hand's appearance was meant to be symbolic and that he represented the children who would derive enjoyment from smashing their action figures into one another, and I was fine with his inclusion. But still, I didn't see any reason why the designers couldn't have worked in one of the classic villains as a mid-boss or a specially designated ultimate evil in one of the harder difficulties.

"It's inexplicable," I thought, "to miss an opportunity like that!"

So I found little reason to continue replaying the 1P Game. I spent most of my time, instead, trying to set records in the Bonus Practice mode, which I considered to be the most compelling part of the package.

I loved the "Break the Targets" and "Board the Platforms" mini-games, and I was especially fond of how they were constructed in a way that required the player to use all of the characters' abilities (and even chain two or three of them together to form special movement-combos). They were, for that reason, some of the most well-designed challenge stages I'd ever seen.

No other Smash Bros. game ever did it better (and it's a travesty that later series entries did away with these challenges entirety).

I spent the rest of the time attempting to unlock the secret characters. I couldn't wait to find out who they were!

Because the game didn't provide hints on how to unlock them and I had absolutely no interest in exhausting every possibility, I decided to look for answers on the Internet, which was, at the time, still in its infancy. It was an era when you had to hunt down information by scouring every known video-game site and enthusiast message board that you could find with early search engines like Yahoo!, and it would be a miracle if you came across information that was actually relevant.

Luckily I was able to find accurate information on a budding website called "Cheat Code Central."

And honestly, I was disappointed with some of HAL's selections. I agreed with Luigi being there because he was, after all, one half of the legendary Mario "Bros." He definitely deserved to be included. I felt that Captain Falcon from F-Zero was an OK choice (mostly because he looked cool), though I wasn't sure about his fighting potential because I'd never seen him outside of the Blue Falcon ("Is it even possible to convincingly translate a racing-game character to a fighting game?" I wondered).

"But the who the hell are Ness and Jigglypuff?!" I questioned in a perplexed manner. "And why should I care about either of them?!"

I mean, I couldn't even guess as to which games they were from!

"This is supposed to be a convergence of Nintendo all-stars," I declared vehemently, "so where are iconic characters like Wario and Pit?!"

I was kinda miffed about them being snubbed and pushed aside in favor of two no-name characters. In the case of Pit, I saw his absence as Nintendo emphatically stating that it had no confidence in the character. I could only determine, from looking at the evidence, that the company no longer saw him as a major star and was happy to throw him into the dustbin of history.

At that point, I figured that it was probably time for me to give up on my dream of seeing the Kid Icarus series resurrected. "It's not going to happen," I thought to myself in a resigned manner. "Nintendo simply doesn't care about that series anymore."

I was left feeling flat by the questionable secret-character choices, and consequently my excitement-level for the game's fighting action was still just as low as it was a few minutes earlier, which is to say that it was close to zero.

But because I didn't want to feel as though I'd been suckered out of my money twice over, I decided that it was necessary to try to find other ways to extract value from Smash Bros. (the only one of the two games that I didn't despise). So over the course of the next few days, I engaged with it in a few different ways: I played a number of 1-on-1 matches against CPU opponents in VS Mode, in which I was able to customize the rules and add some variety to the action. I spent a lot of time experimenting with the characters in Training Mode and thoroughly exploring their repertoires with the aim of inventing new combos. And I continued to set records in the mini-games (except for Jigglypuff's Board the Platforms stage, which I hadn't yet completed because it was basically impossible to do so; that's what I thought until I looked up the solution and learned that you could chain together forward-aerial and Pound attacks and thus hang in the air long enough to reach the stage's bottom-left platform).

Otherwise, I found enjoyment in marveling at and thinking about the game's stages and their visual elements. I felt that all of the stages were excellently designed and filled with interesting little details. Hyrule Castle and the spacious Sector Z were my favorites. They had it all: They were fun to maneuver upon; they had multiple spaces in which you could fight; and they were fun to look at. They were true standouts. The others stages weren't on their level, but still they were pretty damn good. (25 years later, I still maintain that the original Smash Bros. has the series' best stage-set! You can fight me on that!)

And the inclusion of the 8-bit-styled Mushroom Kingdom stage--with its unmistakable scale platforms, functioning warp pipes, piranha plants, and POW blocks--pretty much made my life. It was a beautiful homage to a classic, I thought, and exactly the type of replicated stage environment that I wanted to see in a mascot-mashup. (Really, it was just cool to see characters like Donkey Kong, Link and Captain Falcon running around in the 8-bit Mushroom Kingdom!)

Also, I felt that the stage designers did a great job of incorporating elements from the actual games--those like Congo Jungle's barrel cannon, Whispy Woods wind-blowing tree, and Yoshi's Island's disappearing clouds. Their presence made the stages feel as though they were exact replications of area from the respective games and furthermore added a cool platforming element that did a lot to help Smash Bros. differentiate itself from other fighting games.

I was also fond of the large static images that formed the stages' backgrounds. They were low in resolution and a bit cloudy, yeah, but still they had a lot of charm to them. They had a quietly dominating presence that worked to understatedly imbue stages' every space with nostalgic energy, and they had a wondrously placid appearance that never failed to stir my imagination.

They were an underappreciated part of the game, I felt.

My favorite backgrounds included Hyrule Castle's glorious Death Mountain depiction; Peach's Castle, which was seen from a breathtaking top-down perspective; and Congo Jungle's beautifully rendered sunset. They were filled with nostalgic resonance, and whenever I was fighting on the stages that they accompanied, I couldn't help but stop on occasion and take some time to observe them and absorb the powerfully remindful vibes that were emanating from them.

(I liked Planet Zebes' background, too, if only for its memorable animation: Ridley, in a surprise appearance, flying around in the distance. Animations like that one served to further amplify the stages' nostalgic resonance.)

The stages were also accompanied by arrangements of classic Nintendo tunes. They weren't grand recreations, no, but still they were nicely composed and managed to capture the old games' spirit and even evoke memories of my past gaming experiences. (Congo Jungle's musical theme was so reminiscent that I could have sworn that it was taken directly from Donkey Kong Country!)

Though, the tune that enchanted me the most, if you can believe it, was the menu music. It was a delightfully serene, understated piece, and its wistful vibes created a reflective atmosphere that seemed very appropriate for a game that was meant to celebrate Nintendo's long history and inspire memories of our experiences with the company's life-changing games (and the tune's wistful energy only got more pronounced as the years went by). I loved what it did, and I loved listening to it and enjoying the thoughts and visualizations that it evoked.

Most people would say that a loud, rockin' introductory tune would have been more appropriate for a game about classic Nintendo characters coming together to violently duke it out, but I contend that the menu theme's softer tones do just as well to create an anticipatory atmosphere. They create the feeling of a calm before the storm, and their yearnful energy works to fill your head with powerfully evocative images of the heroes we've known for ages battling it out in the most classic of spaces.

So yeah--the menu theme was one of my favorite elements of the game.

But that was about as far as my appreciation for the game stretched. Beyond marveling at the backgrounds and enjoying the music, there was nothing left for me to do with Smash Bros. I'd extracted all that I could from the game: I'd exhausted the single-player content, and I'd seen enough of the Versus mode to know that it was useless to me.

The Versus mode may have been a source of great fun had I been able to convince others to play the game with me, but in reality, there was no chance of that happening. I didn't have any friends (they were long gone by that point), and James wasn't a fan of fighting games. And for as much as I liked Smash Bros. fighting system, I wasn't going to pretend that 1-on-1 battles against CPU opponents made for particularly exciting demonstrations of its potential.

So the time had finally arrived for me to admit that Super Smash Bros. was a bust and that I wasn't going to be able to extract any real value from it. "Buying it was a mistake," I told myself.

At that point, there was nothing left for me to do but shelve the game and focus my attention elsewhere.

But I didn't fully give up on the game, no. I popped it into my N64 every once in a while and desperately attempted to find more to like about it and unearth some previously undiscovered depth, but each time, I'd arrive at the same conclusion: Aside from its fun, well-designed mini-games, Smash Bros. just didn't have much to offer a single player.

I wasn't too broken up about its failure to deliver, though, because I didn't have time to be bothered by such a thing. I was, after all, the proud new owner of Camelot's outstanding Mario Golf, which was eating up so much of my time that I no attention to spare for some silly mascot fighter!

But my how quickly things changed when I actually started paying attention to what I was doing.

So sometime late in the year, when I was light on entertainment options, I figured that I might as well give Smash Bros. one last shot--one final opportunity to convince me that it wasn't a lost cause. Unfortunately, in following the pattern, it gave me nothing. The 1P Game was as bland as ever, fighting 1-on-1 battles against CPU players in Versus mode was similarly boring, and there was still no sign of any exciting single-player fighting action.

It wasn't going to work out. The game simply didn't have any lasting appeal.

I was just about done with it.

I was seconds away from giving up on it for good when suddenly something amazing happened: As I was thinking about what game I should play next, I started to randomly click about on the Versus mode's character-select screen. That's when I discovered, quite by accident, that you could activate the third- and fourth-player character slots by clicking on the icons located in their upper-left corners!

This meant, most excitingly, that I could include one or two additional CPU characters and participate in 3- or 4-player free-for-alls!

Honestly, I had no idea that you could do that. I read through the game's manual, yeah, but I didn't recall seeing anything about being able have multi-CPU Versus matches. I simply assumed that those extra character slots were reserved only for human players who had controllers plugged into the N64's third and fourth controller ports. I did so because when you entered the Versus-mode character-select screen, only the second character slot was active; the other two slots were colored gray and had shutters over them, and that made me believe that they were firmly locked.

This discovery changed everything!

From that point onward, Smash Bros. was a completely different game to me. Its four-character free-for-all battles, in great contrast to its 1-on-1 battles, proved to be wonderfully chaotic and insanely fun. Never before had I played a fighting game that featured its awesome combination of frenzied combat, breathtaking aerial exchanges, and epic recovery attempts.

And there was, I learned, a ton of variety to its Versus mode: It allowed you to set up team battles, 3-on-1s, 2-on-1s, and even 2-on-1-on-1s! You could play with items on or off! You could play timed or stock matches and also manipulate their respective values however you saw fit to do so!

The possibilities seemed endless!

And suddenly, in an incredible 180-degree turn, Smash Bros. went from being a complete dud to the most irresistible game in my N64 library. I was now hopelessly drawn to its multiplayer action, which I could only describe as "exceedingly addicting."

I couldn't stay away the game. I returned to it every day. And each of my sessions lasted several hours. I played one match after the next, and I stopped only to eat and sleep.

I simply couldn't get enough of the game's action!

And consequently Smash Bros. took over my life!

That's how it went for the better part of the next two years. During that period, playing free-for-alls in Smash Bros. was pretty much my go-to video-game activity. I did it on a constant basis and in every situation.

If it was a boring Sunday, I'd spend it playing Smash Bros. If I had some time to kill before dinner, I'd see it as the perfect opportunity to get in a few Smash Bros. matches. And if no new games were coming out that month, I'd think to myself, "Oh well--that just leaves me more time to play Smash Bros.!"

I'd look for any excuse to return to the game.

And over the course of those two years, I poured more time into Smash Bros. than I did into any other game I'd ever owned. That's how addicted I was.

And I wasn't alone in loving Smash Bros., no. The gaming world at large agreed with me that it was one of the best multiplayer games around. At that point, in fact, it was considered to be the party game. Almost every N64-owner that I knew had it in his or her collection, and all of the rest were repeatedly renting it from Blockbuster. And they, too, were constantly playing Smash Bros. and engaging in fun, frantic multiplayer action.

The game was everywhere, it seemed. I couldn't escape it even when my family and I went on vacation. If we were in, say, Atlantic City, then there was a good chance that the hotel that we were staying in had an N64 rental service whose catalogue included Smash Bros., which would usually top the list of most popularly requested games (the modded N64s that the hotels used for this service might be in those rooms to this day).

There were even times when I was able to talk James and his friends (who would sometimes join us on our vacation) into renting the game and playing it with me in our hotel room. We'd do that so that we could kill some time while we were preparing to head out onto the Boardwalk or waiting for room service to arrive!

Those were some fun times.

In the early days of my free-for-all mania, my main characters were Link and Samus, whose combinations of abusable projectiles and ranged strikes seemingly rendered them elite characters in a game in which being able to control the action from a distance and rack up damage while avoiding the craziness of multi-person clusters was a huge advantage. "These two are clearly the best characters," I thought.

However, as time went on and I became more intimately familiar with the fighting system and its finer details and subtleties, I started to gravitate more toward Mario and Luigi, whose spin attacks were great for setting up all sorts of combos (and Luigi's supreme recoverability ensured that he was never out of a match), and Captain Falcon, who was demonstrably overpowered. I loved all of Falcon's special moves and particularly his devastating Falcon Punch, which hit with explosive impact. I mean, seriously: If you walked into a Falcon Punch when your percentage-meter was even as low as 40%, you were toast!

There was a bit of lag to the Falcon Punch, sure, but that didn't matter to me because I felt that the reward far outweighed the risk. Wildly throwing a Falcon Punch into a three-person scrum could, for instance, accidentally cause you to get sucked into the pile and severely pummeled, sure, but if your timing was correct and the move actually connected, the strike would produce glorious results, with fools rocketing off in all directions to their deaths!

Truly, nothing in video games was more satisfying than connecting with a Falcon Punch, whose viscerally pleasing impact was only amplified by the Captain's fierce, angry bellowing of the move's name. "FALCON ... PUUUUAAAYYYNCH!" he'd yell, the delay between words serving to momentarily paralyze opponents and cause them to look around in fear and worry that they were about to be on the receiving end of an devastating, thunderous stock-killing strike. (I feel that the actors who voiced Falcon in subsequent series games failed to reproduce the N64 incarnation's intensely violent energy and delivery. I wish that Nintendo had stuck with the original voice actor.)

As for the items: I always turned them off. I didn't do so for philosophical reasons, no. I just thought that the game was already chaotic enough without them. I found it hard enough to focus on just the three opponents!

For me, a big part of the fun was thinking about Smash Bros.'s sources of influence. As I experimented with the characters in Training Mode, I attempted to identify their moves and determine their origins.

For characters like Mario and Link, this was easy. I immediately knew which games their attacks were taken from. But there certain characters whose fighting moves were unrecognizable to me, and consequently I had to put my mind to work and look for connections and create theories as to where their moves might have originated.

I made conclusions like, "Well, obviously Donkey Kong is borrowing the Spinning Kong from his friend Dixie Kong, who whirled around in a similar fashion," "The Falcon Kick is likely Captain Falcon's physical simulation of the Blue Falcon hitting a speed-booster," and "Fox's special moves (firing a laser, activating a shield, and using propulsion to thrust himself forward) are designed to imbue him with the characteristics of his ship, the Arwing, and make him the representation of it."

Doing this was yet another way in which I was able to regularly derive great enjoyment from the game.

I spent an equal amount of time imagining what a Smash Bros. sequel would contain. I thought about how a future series entry could potentially evolve the fighting system and the mini-games (I hoped that they'd expand upon the existing mini-games and also add new types of challenges!), certainly, but I spent the majority of the time thinking about how large its roster could be and how other Nintendo mascots and characters from Capcom, Konami, Tecmo and such would translate over to Smash's world.

There was so much for me to consider: "What would the new characters' special moves be?!" I obsessively wondered. "What kind of entrance animations would they have?! How can Smash's engine be stretched to accommodate their quirkier attacks and maneuvers?! And what items could be mined from their games?"

I constantly thought about the possibilities!

Because I knew that there was enormous potential in a Smash Bros. sequel. "It can become gaming's premier crossover fighter game," I felt. And I never missed a chance to dream about it.

And in the end, I was actually glad that Masahiro Sakurai and his team decided to use Smash Bros. as a platform to introduce us to characters like Ness and Jigglypuff. Because I came to realize that their inclusion epitomized what the game was really all about: bringing something different to the table, shining a spotlight on the overlooked and the underappreciated, and celebrating all aspects of Nintendo's rich history.

Were it not for Smash Bros., I wouldn't have known anything about these characters, and I'd have been a lesser enthusiast as a result. So I'm happy that I got the opportunity to meet them and learn about their respective histories. They didn't steal other characters' slots, no; they were there because it was where they belonged. "And besides," I felt safe in thinking, "there's always the chance that Wario and Pit could show up in a future Smash Bros. game! Because a series as respectful as this one is bound to include them at some point!"

That future entry arrived two years later in the form of Super Smash Bros. Melee, with which I have a complicated history. The short of it is that the game wowed me at first but ultimately (for reasons that I'll explain in an upcoming piece) proved to be no replacement for the original work. For a while, I split my time between the two entries, but eventually I left Melee behind and went back to playing the original Smash Bros. exclusively. I just liked it more.

To this day, I still prefer Super Smash Bros. over all of its sequels, none of which, I contend, are as purely fun as the original.

In the later years, I squeezed a ton of extra value out of Super Smash Bros. after I discovered that you could use GameShark modification codes to substitute characters into mini-games in which they didn't belong (you could use Luigi in Fox's specially designed Board the Platforms stage, for instance, or even swap in characters like Metal Mario, Giant Donkey Kong and Master Hand!). I spent countless hours clearing each mini-game with each character, and consequently I cut down my best-time numbers to totals that were previously unimaginable.

So I'd found yet another way to derive enjoyment from one of my all-time-favorite games! Really, trying to complete challenges like, say, clearing Kirby's and Jigglypuff's respective mini-games with characters who lacked their aerial proficiency was some of the most fun I'd ever had with the game!

These days, I find comfort in playing and immersing myself in Super Smash Bros. Doing so always transports me back to a special time and place. It evokes great memories of an era in which 3D games were wonderfully experimental and exciting for that reason. It makes me happy to be a fan of video games and all of Nintendo's amazing characters. And it reminds me of how much fun I had with one of the best fighting games to ever come around.

The game's graphics are a bit rough-looking, sure, but that works to its credit. Its character models' blocky nature lends it what I call a "quintessential video-game aesthetic," by which I mean "This is what video games looked like when they were just trying to be what they were and they were proud to embrace their technological limitations." The next-generation Smash Bros. games, in comparison, are so shiny and slick-looking that they fail to possess its nostalgic simplicity and charm.

Super Smash Bros. is replete with remindful images and sounds, which is why I enjoy looking at it and listening to it as much as I do playing it. That it's able to evoke such intense feelings of longing is why I consider its release to mark the end of the old days, when creators weren't afraid to ask the player to use his or her imagination; when information wasn't readily available and you had to scour the Internet in search of tips and codes; and when games were still games rather than large, expensive productions.

Super Smash Bros. stands as a representative of how things were before modernity brought us the explosion of the Internet and the rise of super-powered machines. It's a pure nostalgia trip, and its every vibe reminds you of where you were at the time.

For certain, Super Smash Bros. will continue to do that job for me. As the series moves further and further away from what made its progenitor so easily accessible and endlessly replayable--as it continuously adds layers of complexity that diminish the take-it-to-'em nature of the battles and instead encourage overly conservative and defensive fighting styles and the avoidance of aerial combat--Super Smash Bros. will remain my rock, and its action will never fail to remind me why I fell in love with the series in the first place. It's my hope that future Smash Bros. directors will go back and study it and aim to understand all of the important lessons that it taught.

Above all, Super Smash Bros. will persist in its endeavor to teach us that the medium's history will remain relevant so long as there are people who are eager to discover it, celebrate it, and enthusiastically immerse themselves in it. And if there's any justice in the world, then Super Smash Bros. will continue to find audiences that will proudly proclaim themselves to be rabid fans of it. And their passion for it will no doubt ensure that its spirit lives on forever.

To me, a gaming world in which the past and the present could live together harmoniously would be an ideal space.

It would be one that was, you could say, positively smashing.