Volume 1 : E3 2005: A Beginning

Introduction


Hello, Everyone. My name is Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo Co., Ltd. Beginning today, I would like to deliver an interview that explains the vision and the development process
behind the creation of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But before we begin, I would like to offer an apology.

So this is for the "Iwata Asks" interviews, right?

In other words, this is where you, the president of Nintendo, interview the developers working for Nintendo.

Is it okay for me to be here since I&rsquo;m not a Nintendo employee?

Of course, you&rsquo;re my former employee, after all.


That&rsquo;s right! (laughs) So it&rsquo;s the "Iwata Asks His Former Employee Interview," then.


Actually, maybe I should first explain how I came to be your former boss.

Of course. (laughs) So Sakurai-kun1 &mdash; and I use this form of address purposefully, since I was your first boss after you came to HAL Laboratory and started working in the gaming industry &mdash; remind me how old were you at that time?
 <table border="0" class="note">
 <tr>
 <td valign="top">1.</td>
 <td valign="top">Similar to "San" as in "Iwata-san", "Kun" is an informal honorific primarily, generally used towards males. It is used by persons of senior status in addressing those of junior status.</td>

 </tr>
</table>

Right. Still young and full of energy. (laughs)
 
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So, you and I, the two of us, took on an assignment to develop the prototype for the original Super Smash Bros. for N64, and since I had worked as president of HAL Laboratory before becoming president at Nintendo&hellip;

&hellip;it&rsquo;s the "Iwata Asks His Former Employee Interview."

Right. Let&rsquo;s get started then.

E3 2005: A Beginning

First off, why don&rsquo;t we talk about how the Smash Bros. Brawl got started? I believe it was at E3, right?

E3 is an international gaming event and I myself was at the E3 in May of 2005 to give a presentation about the Wii. At the time, the Wii was still being referred to by its code name "Revolution" and Nintendo revealed the exterior design of this new gaming console as well as the fact that it would include Wi-Fi support. Before the presentation, we polled a large number of people on what Nintendo titles they hoped to see made available for network play and many put Smash Bros. at the top of their list. All the employees from Nintendo of America that were involved with E3 at the time strongly wanted to announce a new Super Smash Bros. that would be compatible with Wi-Fi play. But at the time, we still hadn&rsquo;t discuss this thoroughly with HAL Laboratory yet, which shared the rights to Smash Bros. with Nintendo, and we hadn&rsquo;t even begun planning out the production process. So I have announced this subject, emphasizing that I was hoping that a Smash Bros. game would be released as a Wi-Fi compatible title. However, most people from Japan that were in the conference room took this as an official announcement that Nintendo was going to release a new Smash Bros. Looking back at it now, I do regret the way I said this; you can&rsquo;t blame them for interpreting it that way&hellip;Naturally, it was a splash of cold water for you.

Absolutely. (laughs) You can imagine my surprise when I was told by the others at the E3 show site that you made the announcement out of the blue.

I even heard that the people around you at E3 were asking you whether or not you would develop the Smash Bros. game.

Yeah, it was rough. (laughs) I had no idea what to say.


So, during that E3, I invited you to my hotel room and told you what I was hoping to do. That was the start of the project&hellip;there wasn&rsquo;t any specifications set, nor were there any framework.


And the fact that I had already quit HAL Laboratory made the things a bit complicated&hellip;

Well, I had considered what I would do if you turned me down and decided that I would need to take the existing Smash Bros. title, Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube, and try to make it Wi-Fi capable while preserving as much balanced game play as possible in the event you didn&rsquo;t want to get involved. Maybe it&rsquo;s more appropriate to say that I realized we wouldn&rsquo;t be able to add any new elements to the game without your help and I think I said as much when we discussed it at the hotel. It wasn&rsquo;t right, but you might even say I used it as a threat of sorts.

It certainly had the desired impact!

(laughs)
 
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Actually, I was a freelance game developer at the time and had planned to use the E3 as a means to gather information on the newest hardware and software and figure out what I would work on next. And then I met up with you. I had some other job requests already and had a hard time making up my mind. In the end though, I decided there were no other jobs with the potential that I could get people to be as happy as the Smash Bros. project. After all, it was already clear that lots of people were looking forward to it. So, I decided to accept the project. Or, accepted that I had no choice but to take it.

For which I&rsquo;m thankful. Even so, we weren&rsquo;t ready for development.

Right. We didn&rsquo;t have any staff as I was working freelance. I don&rsquo;t think you could have made things harder for ourselves if you tried. (laughs)

Searching for Office and Staff

So that&rsquo;s how it all started. And at the time, the former Smash Bros. team at HAL Laboratory had their hands full with another project. But it was starting the project in this way, however, that enabled us to make the Smash Bros. Brawl development team something like no other.


That&rsquo;s right. There were suggestions to house the project at Nintendo in Kyoto, but after talking through some ideas, we determined that it was necessary to do the project in Tokyo and we rented an office in Takadanobaba specifically for this game. I even moved to Takadanobaba.


Right, for the project. I mean, if you want to make a new Smash Bros., you have to be ready to put everything else on hold if you want to make it work.

Marriage of home and the work place.

Right. Then, just when we were looking for some help, we secured some staff from another video game developer.


We were introduced to this company by Miyamoto-san. You can share the name if you like.


Oh, okay. It was Game Arts. It was just after they had finished Grandia III and they told us that they had some staff free. So, we decided to leave the main part of preliminary development to them while we began to hire remaining staff. We did so by looking for people specifically for the Smash Bros. Brawl title.

I think it&rsquo;s quite unique to conduct hiring specifically for one game. After all, it&rsquo;s clear when we say that "we are seeking help for this project," but then there was no guarantee of employment once the project was finished.

Even so, I think people who work together at these occasions tend to form the right connections and that, including myself, several of our staff will probably work with each other sometime in the future. The reason I myself became a freelancer is out of the limitation I felt from working endlessly with the same people on the same series.
 
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Also, special projects like this often give rise to a special level of trust, sometimes creating a deep and lasting camaraderie.

Right. I think it&rsquo;s possible for good things to happen when you bring in outside staff or outsource some work. In fact, the staff members we pulled together for this project, including everyone from Game Arts, were all highly-skilled individuals.

How many staff members did you end up having for this project?

Roughly 100 individuals. Of course, there would be even more if you count supervisors and contractors. Looking at all the staff that appears in the staff credits, it was about 700 people.

So the number of people involved fulltime was roughly 100.

Betting on Success

Despite the abilities of your staff, didn&rsquo;t it take a lot of energy to make sure everyone was on the same page? After all, everyone had worked under very different conditions before being called together suddenly, solely for the development of the next Smash Bros.


I&rsquo;m not sure everyone was fully on the same page, but they&rsquo;re all grown ups! (laughs) And if there is one thing you can say about the people we assembled for the project, it&rsquo;s that they had a clear desire to work on the next Smash Bros title. I think this saved us from encountering problems.


So you didn&rsquo;t have anyone saying "But I don&rsquo;t want to work on Smash Bros!"

Right. (laughs) Everyone was pretty reasonable in that sense.

You know, these aren&rsquo;t the type of procedures I would employ for just any game. I mean, if this was a regular game, I would never work this way.

My decision to pursue the project in this way rested on one point and one point alone, and it is deeply tied to the point about which I have the utmost faith in a man named Masahiro Sakurai. To state it simply, you are capable of taking a project with nothing and visualizing a completed game almost perfectly in your head. As I mentioned earlier, you and I have a long history working together at HAL Laboratory. When involved on the same project, you were able to point out the smallest details even when the product had yet to take shape. The details were so small and so specific that, as a programmer, I thought there was no way you could know what you knew without actually trying it first. As the game progressed and took shape, however, it was clear that we needed to address the details in just the way you had described. So I would ask "did you really know this right from the start?" I mean, this was over ten years ago, but I remember you said you did and I thought to myself "is this guy for real?" As it happened over and over again, however, I had little choice but to believe you. I don&rsquo;t know how, but you&rsquo;re able to visualize a game right down to its very details, as if the finished game is working inside your mind. If not, how else could you have been right so many times? Even now, Masahiro Sakurai, of all the people that I know, you especially can readily form an image of how a game will look when finished. That&rsquo;s why I knew that you would be capable of putting together the ideas of the talented staff around you. If you don&rsquo;t have a person like that pulling together different ideas, you need a lot of trust within the team or the project will not go anywhere. When a project has just begun, it&rsquo;s natural for directions to come from a vague concept of the product. It&rsquo;s natural for there to be revisions and twists and turns, and as this continues, the project becomes something different than it was at the start. This is not necessarily a bad thing and happens all the time when designing games. However, this only works because of the trust built up from the past of a long working relationship. That&rsquo;s why it was so unusual to recruit outside staff solely for the purpose of making such a large-scale game. Yet it was exactly this type of thinking on which I was betting our success.
 
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Wow&hellip;uh, thanks for the words of praise. (laughs)

Well, it&rsquo;s not just a compliment. I realized I made a decision that would place a heck of a lot of pressure on you. (laughs)

In actuality, it did. I&rsquo;d like to take a moment to explain something since it might not be readily apparent to our customers, but making something is often thought of in terms of following a series of steps from start to finish. In reality though, it&rsquo;s quite different and there are several places at which you can go astray when designing a game.

There are many circumstances in which you can&rsquo;t envision how another person will feel about something until you&rsquo;ve tried making it yourself. For this reason, there are many cases, unfortunately, in which you make something that seems theoretically right but ends up being a mess. At least in my experience that is.

And, if you&rsquo;re wondering whether I&rsquo;m capable of producing a final product exactly the same as the one I envision in my mind, well the answer is a definite no. Of course there are things that never made it in the game.

I think it was your unprecedented development strategies that enabled Smash Bros. Brawl to take its shape.

Of course, it must have taken a lot of hard work to get there.

Volume 2 : For First-time Gamers

As If It Was the Last In the Series


Can you tell me about the things that first came to mind when you thought about developing a new Smash Bros. game?


I felt that a large premise of the project was that this was not a series that would continue indefinitely. After all, it wasn&rsquo;t possible to keep on increasing the characters that are entitled to take the field in Smash Bros. And even if you try to utilize new familiar characters that resonate with the fans, you can&rsquo;t get each and every gamer to be happy. Just like its predecessor then, we decided to design the game as if it was the last one in the series.

At any rate, considering all our available options, what would the optimal game look like? If this was our last chance to mobilize all our forces, what features would be most appealing to our gamers? What would make our customers happy? This line of thinking was the main key to development.

What did you think of the fact that the platform to be used was the Wii?


Well, first of all, when I heard about the Revolution, or Wii concept at the E3 in 2005, I had this feeling that games with features that anyone can master, like Wii Sports, would become the new main attraction. Of course I thought there would be more conventional games too, but I thought that easily enjoyable games would become the next big thing.


Making games that broke with convention was the key concept for the Revolution.

Right. I thought this direction was pretty spectacular and heartily applauded the flexible approach you were proposing. At the same time, however, I didn&rsquo;t think that Smash Bros. had to fully adhere to this approach. Rather, I thought that I should remain cognizant of this new concept Nintendo had developed, but then think about what development path was right for the new Smash Bros.
 
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Of course, I think there was a possibility of taking Smash Bros. in a more casual-gaming direction. For example, we could make the art style simpler or make it possible to use Miis. However, with the various titles that the Wii was to offer, I felt that people were looking for something different. That&rsquo;s the reason I decided in very early stages of development that the Wii pointer and motion movements would not be a primary feature of the game.

The Nunchuk controller can be used to play the retail version of Smash Bros. Brawl, but it&rsquo;s not highlighted as the main controller.

That&rsquo;s right. Ultimately, the game supports the Wii Remote, the Classic Controller, the Nunchuk and the Nintendo GameCube controller, and having support for these four controllers was something that we set from the start of the planning stages. However, the purpose of designing Smash Brothers Brawl was not Wii-like play that utilizes the pointer. If we had decided to adhere to the new approach offered by the Wii, I think it would have been possible to design the game with more unconventional controls. However, in the end, I set aside several ideas as I thought it was important to dedicate our resources to developing what our gamers were looking for.

In regards to whether or not Smash Bros. Brawl was moving in the same direction as the Wii, I decided purposefully not to worry about this question and told myself that this would be the role of Smash Bros. Brawl in regards to the Wii. This is a decision that I made very clear in the first project planning document.

Even though I was responsible for the Wii and setting this new direction, I thought the worst thing we could do is keep proposing the same games. Stated simply, I think it&rsquo;s important to have variety. Back in the days that we worked at HAL Laboratory we used to say that we won&rsquo;t stand a chance if we do what Miyamoto-san might do, so let&rsquo;s do something he wouldn&rsquo;t, right?
 
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I think you can see the roots of my ideology flourishing at Nintendo today and I&rsquo;ll be very happy if this way of thinking continues to expand the range of products that Nintendo offers.

It&rsquo;s best to have both approaches, right? If I had been at Nintendo, I may have made a Smash Bros. Brawl that was more in line with the Wii. As a result, I feel, in some ways, that my decision-making wasn&rsquo;t the very best&hellip;particularly as gamers readily tire of games these days. Smash Bros. Brawl may not be effective as it tries to perfect the experience of conventional games.

Without a doubt, the rapid speed at which consumers make purchases and then grow tired of them is an area of game development in which the balance has been thoroughly upset. Some time ago we were able to say "if we invest this much effort to make this type of product, gamers should get this much fun play time out of it." Now, however, these odds are changing and there is a feeling that the product won&rsquo;t hold the gamers attention unless you continually design more game contents and add more depth.

That&rsquo;s why I think games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit were a step in the right direction. I&rsquo;m not saying that these games lack depth, but these games proposed an unprecedented line of thinking and broke from the old "more contents and more depth" philosophy.

Right, but that absolutely doesn&rsquo;t mean that we did this because we thought development would be easy. An astounding amount of effort was actually put into the fundamental development process of these titles. We&rsquo;re investing our efforts in other areas besides graphics and data capacity. However, as I mentioned earlier, if all our games mirror games like Wii Sports or Wii Fit, our gamers would soon grow bored. It&rsquo;s truly a division of duties.

For First-time Gamers


Putting it another way, I think games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, games that anyone can enjoy, are a good thing for Smash Bros. Brawl. Without games like these, there would be those that otherwise not come into contact with a form of entertainment like gaming.


Though not everyone who picks up a controller for the very first time because of games like Wii Sports or Wii Fit will play Smash Bros. Brawl, there will most certainly be those that do. And among them, I&rsquo;m sure there will be those who will find Smash Bros. interesting too. Games like Wii Sports or Wii Fit will draw people in through their appeal to the senses, and this, in turn, will develop their interest in games like Smash Bros. Brawl. I think that is the true meaning of expanding the gaming population. Of course, I&rsquo;m not trying to say that Smash Bros. isn&rsquo;t meant for beginners and, in fact, development of the original Smash Bros. began with the idea of making a game that people unfamiliar to gaming could come to enjoy it just as much as everyone else within the first ten minutes of play.

Right. That is the main concept behind the Smash Bros. series, and the feature is more well-defined in Smash Bros. Brawl.

Also, I think that fundamentally, we shouldn&rsquo;t try and separate the casual gamers from the core gamers. After all, everyone starts off as a casual gamer. Some of these casual gamers will end up falling in love with gaming. Despite this fact though, I think that people too often treat them as entities that are inherently different.

I think this is because we ignore the passage of time and tend to take a snapshot solely of the present when we talk about these things. But it&rsquo;s different. People that love games and are really good at games were once, at some point in the past, casual gamers themselves. That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s so important to make sure that you continue to bring in new gamers. If you don&rsquo;t, there will come a day when you don&rsquo;t have any more customers.
 
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Now that I think of it, that&rsquo;s something you started saying when you designed Kirby. You were able to make a game like Kirby in order to get people interested in gaming and that it would be a type of game you could recommend to first-time gamers.

Wow, that brings back some memories! (laughs)

I don&rsquo;t think you&rsquo;ve ever let go of that concept&hellip;not even once. Actually, this is one of the more unusual facts about this man we call Sakurai&hellip;even though he&rsquo;s an extremely skilled gamer, he always takes great lengths to develop games that first-time gamers can pick up without hesitation. Generally speaking, skilled gamers tend to make games for themselves. This being the case, how did you come about your particular mindset?

Well, I think the first thing that I should clear up is that lately my gaming skill has mellowed down a bit.

And, this is something that I often told you back in the day, but before coming to HAL, I played a lot of different games and tried to look at games on the market from a variety of angles. What I felt at the time, just like you said earlier, is that games you could recommend to a first-time gamer didn&rsquo;t exist. At the time, complexity was escalating and the only games available were ones that really challenged its players.

Every game was focused on solving something. Shooting games required you to evade hails of gunfire and fighting games kept growing more and more difficult.

Right. So it&rsquo;s only natural that I had some doubts about games at the time.

Well, it may be natural in retrospect, but I think the fact that you have been saying that all along is pretty substantial.

Well, gaming for me is not about making games that I want to play.

Ultimately, gaming should be about the customers and I couldn&rsquo;t figure out at the time why there were so few games made with the customers in mind. I thought it strange at the time and I feel the same way today.
 
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You know, listening to what you said called to mind how we worked on Kirby and started the Smash Bros. series to make it much easier for first-time users to get into gaming, and that making games that everyone can play doesn&rsquo;t mean making simple games. Working on games like this with you had a big impact in defining how I would come to view gaming. In other words, my thoughts on expanding the gaming population, targeting gamers age five to ninety-five or refusing to think of gamers in terms of age, sex or gaming experience&hellip;I think the roots of the ideals I espouse are tied to our experience together, and I feel they were inspired by you. Of course, a mantra of mine is that of the experiences I&rsquo;ve had, there&rsquo;s nothing that was put to waste. What I learned from you, however, is of especially great value.

Speaking of shared roots, we were both surprised in regards to the similarities between the direction of the Smash Bros. Brawl network and the Wi-Fi connection proposed by Nintendo.

That&rsquo;s right. That was a surprise alright. Why don&rsquo;t we talk about it next?

Volume 3 : Versus, Co-op and Share

Concepts Shared from the Start


As I mentioned in the beginning, Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii was a title that many players wanted for Wi-Fi play. Therefore, making Super Smash Bros. Brawl available online in one form or another was a necessary premise.


Right. This was conveyed to me at the E3 in May of 2005 and two months later on July 7, 2005, I finished the project plan document for Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Since it was you that wrote the document, most of the features found in the final version of Smash Bros. Brawl are extremely close to what was written in the document.

Well, there were lots of things that didn&rsquo;t make it into the document too. At any rate, in the report, I covered, for the most part, how to deal with the online aspect for Smash Bros. Brawl. For example, when battling through the internet, a player has the option to brawl With Friends or With Anyone. When playing With Friends, you can compose short messages, but when brawling with random players, however, names aren&rsquo;t displayed and neither records nor brawling results are saved. This was very similar to what Nintendo was proposing for its Wi-Fi Connection (WFC), but at the time I finished the document in July of 2005, the WFC service didn&rsquo;t exist.

Not that we didn&rsquo;t have it&hellip;we were actually in the middle of development. Naturally, we weren&rsquo;t letting anyone else know what we were working on and I didn&rsquo;t talk about any detailed features or concepts when I asked you to work on Smash Bros.

Yet, when we swapped the Smash Bros. Brawl document and the project plan for the Nintendo WFC and compared features, there was a great deal of correlation.
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It was quite surprising. (laughs) To me, online gaming had always been a place for the strong. One person would be living it up while hundreds or thousands of people were unhappy. I can&rsquo;t completely reject this model of course, but as long as things remain this way, online gaming can spread only so far no matter what you do. I mean, even if people thought it looked interesting, most would hesitate to get involved and stay lingering on the sidelines.

Therefore, we tried to think of ways to avoid this form of online gaming and ways to fashion an environment in which parents would feel safe letting their children play games online, debating at length on topics like how to create an online environment free of harassment. As a result, our concept of the WFC slowly began to take shape with two separate modes of play; players could play with friends or play with people they don&rsquo;t know. It would be more about the fun of sharing rather than simply competing. Amazingly, these were the proposals I found in the first document you gave me.

That&rsquo;s right. When people think of playing Smash Bros. online, they think about battling opponents to see what happens based on their record of wins or losses, or about holding tournaments online. But I felt that this would make it a service from which only a select group of players could derive enjoyment. For Smash Bros., there are small communities here and there where there&rsquo;s fun in winning and losing, even when there are more skilled players than others. But if you make an environment where everyone is trying to climb their way to the top of a single tall mountain, it&rsquo;s clear that the people having fun would be limited to a small number of individuals.
 
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Those in the top five might feel pretty good about themselves, but what happens if you&rsquo;re number 15,398 in the rankings? People considered formidable in their own particular community wouldn&rsquo;t be the least bit pleased.

Furthermore, since Smash Bros. is likely to have a broad gaming base, those that enjoy playing it within their own community might still end up number 100,000 in the rankings.

We were in nearly complete agreement on these things without ever having talked about it. Maybe it was because of our long experience of working together...or possibly our shared roots. (laughs)

Versus, Co-op and Share


As long as we&rsquo;re on the topic, why don&rsquo;t we talk about the details of playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl through the internet?


Sure. Of course, you can battle with others. However, I also wanted to offer other primary forms of game play and, ultimately, created three different elements: Versus, Co-op (cooperative game play) and Share. As we discussed earlier, with Versus, you have the option to battle With Friends or With Anyone. Of course, players can also fight in free-for-alls, or two can compete in challenges like the Home-Run Contest.

You can attack the Sandbag together at the same time, or you can change the setup to something like a track and field event and take turns hitting two sandbags with the player hitting it the farthest being named the winner. You&rsquo;d be surprised by how fired up you can get! (laughs)






Home-Run Contest Video

Like when playing a time trial mode, there&rsquo;s not a lot of emotion when playing alone. Playing against someone, however, seems to add some unique pressure.

Exactly. Moving on, Co-op offers cooperative play in which players form teams to compete in contests like the Team Multi-Man Brawl. Also, when participating in a Brawl, you can form teams not just with your Friends but with Anyone, which has both elements of Versus and Co-op.
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Really? In With Anyone you can battle as a team?

Yes. When four people play together, they&rsquo;re assigned randomly to fight two-on-two.

That means that you can team up and play with someone you don&rsquo;t even know.

Right. When four players get together, there&rsquo;s going to be those who always place third or fourth. However, with the opportunity to be partnered with a stronger player, they now have the chance to taste the thrill of victory.

Lastly, the Share feature enables you to exchange Snapshots or have them distributed by Nintendo&rsquo;s server.

Versus and Co-op features both look like fun, but I think the Share feature might just be the sort of unique fun that Smash Bros. Brawl can make by utilizing the internet.

Stage Builder

Simply stated, the Stage Builder enables players to build their own stages. Just like the name says, right? (laughs) By combining several different components, like platforms, the width of the stage, and traps, players are free, to a certain extent, to create their own stages. They can upload these stages to Nintendo&rsquo;s server, where it is then sent to other players. In other words, once everyday, a new stage made by someone, somewhere can be sent to your Wii.

And the stages sent in this way then disappear.

Right. We figured making these stages available for just one day would make it more interesting.

Treasuring every encounter, right?

Right. We wanted players to look forward to these encounters.

And, if the stages piled up, it would be difficult to choose from such an endless supply. I think it&rsquo;s the right decision considering that players have a limited amount of time to play games.

Right. I thought it would be easier to understand and more fun if a new stage was available for play everyday. Personally, I&rsquo;m a fan of having new experiences each time you play.

Ultimately, I think the reason for bringing people together to play via the internet is to make each gaming experience unique. After all, the incentives for going online to view blogs that are continually updated and those that are not are very different.

I agree. But the required time and effort increases when you try and make something like that. Enabling players to design their own stages, upload them to the server and then send them to other Wii consoles, well, it&rsquo;s clear doing things like that will be pretty difficult.
 
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You can say that again. (laughs) At the same time, however, these are things you can accomplish with the right amount of effort and it&rsquo;s not something that you can&rsquo;t do if you find the help and build the system.

Right. The more effort you invest, the bigger the payoff in terms of fun. This is true of exchanging Snapshots too; players come up with forms of game play that we would never think of on our own. In this way, our resources are limited only by the number of our players, and it would be a waste not to let players enjoy the ideas of other players.

I agree. Nowadays, just looking at the Check Mii Out Channel shows how the ideas of our players outpace our own.

I&rsquo;m truly impressed by Wii players. They come up with ways to play and use the Wii that would never occur to us.

Another reason we incorporated the Stage Builder was simply to make it possible for players to get more out of the stages. In Smash Bros. Melee, for example, Big Blue and Pok&eacute; Floats were known as challenging stages to play.

It&rsquo;s not that they were hard per se, but there were so many formidable obstacles that caused the unexpected to happen.

Exactly! (laughs) This time around, however, we refrained from using many stages like these. The backgrounds might change dramatically, but most large walls and ceilings were removed since we were aiming for simple, easy-to-maneuver stages. Yet, part of the appeal of the Smash Bros. series is that the unexpected can happen on more extreme stages. It would feel wrong if these challenging stages were missing from this title, so we decided to use the Stage Builder as a means of filling the gap.
 
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I see. In addition to offering conventional stages with standard play, you were hoping that players would make stages encouraging a high degree of improvisation.

Super Smash Bros. Spectator

So, with the Share feature, players are able to share Snapshots, stages and&hellip;

&hellip;Replay. Replay enables players to record one entire match and replay it. That way, for example, you can play Target Smash!! mode and send a recording to your friends proving that "hey man, I cleared this in just 5 seconds!" Of course, you can also use this for memorable Brawls and such.

It&rsquo;s a blast to watch impressive Smash Bros. battles. One of my personal sayings is that a fun game is one you can enjoy just by watching. Smash Bros. is truly one that&rsquo;s fun to watch.

That&rsquo;s why I hope players are looking forward to Spectator. I think this will be a big part of the new title.

The Super Smash Bros. Spectator?


Right. Super Smash Bros. Spectator. (laughs) With this feature, you can record a Brawl and share it once it&rsquo;s been posted to Nintendo&rsquo;s server.

In other words, this mode enables you to become a Brawl spectator.

Right. I&rsquo;m not sure how it will work out, but I really wanted to make it happen this time around.
 
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Right. Because watching talented players compete at Smash Bros. tournaments is a lot of fun.

Memorable Brawls, like sports broadcast on TV, can be sent to other Wiis.

Wow, I can hardly wait. You know though, all we&rsquo;ve talked about so far are the network features and we already covered this much.

Yeah, we haven&rsquo;t even breached the surface of the most fundamental features of the game! (laughs)

Volume 4 : The Subspace Emissary

Like Making Two Distinct Games


In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, there were some big developments for solo play.


Whoops! (laughs) Maybe I did go a bit overboard.


It&rsquo;s just that Smash Bros. has always been played as a fighting game and I didn&rsquo;t think it would be possible to make the single-player Adventure Mode a primary form of game play. However, I was impressed by how well it turned out. Can you talk about why you were set on developing an Adventure Mode and how you got there?


Well, as I discussed earlier, a fundamental idea at the start of development was that this would be the last Smash Bros. title, and that, ultimately, there would be few opportunities for Nintendo characters and major, well-known characters to gather in the same place.


So this too was truly a once-in-a-lifetime event, where you had to treasure every encounter.


Right. Blessed with such an opportunity, I tried to think of ways we could enable players to more thoroughly enjoy such a rare all-star lineup and, in the end, I pulled a power play. To put it simply, the Adventure Mode is like a stand-alone title offered in the same package. In terms of development work as well, it was like making two distinct games.


So, what it shares with the multiplayer mode are the character data and programming for basic movements. Everything else is different, right?


Right. We had to change the basic game systems for the two modes. Also, even though character movements are pretty much the same, we made adjustments to things like the speed at which characters run for the Adventure Mode.


Well, I can&rsquo;t help but ask&hellip;what possessed you do to all this?


(laughs)
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I don&rsquo;t know if I can accurately express my feeling but, I mean, Smash Bros. has received high marks from all over for the fighting pleasure it provides and I felt that merely refining what was already there was too simple and would preclude changes. Don&rsquo;t get me wrong though, the fighting is more advanced than before.


The fighting part being fun is already a given, and if development focused solely on fighting, all people could comment on would have been things like which characters are stronger this time.


Exactly. If we did that, things will just shift more to the extreme. Also, I didn&rsquo;t feel like players wanted us to change the nature of Smash Bros. fighting style, or change the game to a 3D fighting game.

Right. The appeal of Smash Bros. is that anyone can take a controller, readily pick up the fundamentals and, within a span of ten minutes, a beginner can sit down and get loud with a pro and enjoy some exciting game play. There&rsquo;s no reason to change this, right?

Need for a Story


So, can you tell me about the Adventure Mode&rsquo;s&hellip;actually, please tell me the title of the Adventure Mode.


Sure. The Adventure Mode is called The Subspace Emissary.


Can you tell me more about the development process for The Subspace Emissary?


Well, first of all, the number of players that wanted a storyline in Smash Bros. Melee was not few. Generally speaking, this is a feature you won&rsquo;t find in the games I design, but players were looking for more from the storyline. Because Smash Bros. brings together so many different characters though, developing a conventional storyline was going to be impossible.


Each character comes from their own world, and there&rsquo;s no end to their different restrictions and limitations.


Right. Not only do they come from their own worlds, but an even more basic problem was the fact that it felt really strange to put someone like Mario and Link together in the same frame.

The feel of the characters are different and, more importantly, it felt wrong to put characters with different head to body ratios side-by-side. It&rsquo;s not so bad in a high action environment like the Brawl where everyone is moving all at once, but when I was writing the project plan document, I didn&rsquo;t think it would be possible to make them look good together in a serious movie sequence.
 
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So you thought about giving up the idea.



But then you decided to bring in a storyline.


Right. The impetus for my decision was the side-scrolling mode in Smash Bros. Melee and I had been thinking about improving this feature from the beginning of planning. Then, while thinking about how I might make the side-scrolling mode more interesting for our players, I decided it was absolutely necessary to incorporate a sense of suspense to urge players on.


Because the suspense of what happens next is what drives players most when playing a side-scrolling action game.


Right. With older games, players were thrown into the game without any particular objective. With games nowadays though, you just can&rsquo;t do that, leading me to the conclusion that we couldn&rsquo;t have a game without a storyline. With Smash Bros., however, there are way too many characters and the game is made without a main character. Therefore, I had a really hard time figuring out how we might establish a storyline.

At that point, I decided to ask Kazushige Nojima-san to help us since he had composed the scenarios for titles like Final Fantasy VII.


Wow, asking the person who crafted scenarios for Final Fantasy to write one for Smash Bros. is a pretty big deal.


I know! (laughs) I didn&rsquo;t ask him to write everything from scratch though. I explained the world of Smash Bros. and its characters and then asked for his help. The first storyline he came up with, however, wasn&rsquo;t exactly what I was looking for.


It was different than what you had envisioned.


Right. It wasn&rsquo;t bad at all and had its own appeal, but it was a bit different than what I had envisioned it would be. It went something like this&hellip;"Some of the characters are on a bus on the way to the stadium. Samus is there. Donkey Kong is there and Snake is watching the bus from afar." It was like that. (laughs) I had envisioned a more serious tone for the story. Something with some misfortune like a single character escaping total annihilation of his squadron and then fighting back while rounding up his allies. Ultimately, we worked together and successfully organized our ideas into the storyline for
The Subspace Emissary.


In other words, you came up with a storyline that neither of you could have produced on your own.


Good for Beginners Too


I suspect The Subspace Emissary might be a good place for Smash Bros. beginners to learn the ABC&rsquo;s.


I think you&rsquo;re right. The objective is clear since there&rsquo;s a storyline and, if you have someone to play with, you can make progress as a team.

Right. Co-op. Fundamentally, two characters take the field in Adventure Mode and battle side-by-side through the stages. The level of difficulty can also be adjusted which means it&rsquo;s good for beginners too.


How many levels of difficulty are there?


Five. Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard and Intense. Intense, however, was made mostly for the curious, and Very Hard can be considered the highest level of play for standard playing purposes. By the way, the level of difficulty can also be adjusted for other modes of play and not just for The Subspace Emissary.


That means beginners can start with Easy then. Fundamentally, Smash Bros. is designed to make different things happen simply by pressing random buttons, so some amazing things can happen without even trying. This makes it easy for beginners to get involved.


Which reminds me, Shogo Sakai-san did some test play the other day and cleared The Subspace Emissary on the Easy setting.


You mean the same Shogo Sakai-san from HAL Laboratory who was in charge of music for Smash Bros. Brawl? I&rsquo;m guessing the reason you bring him up is because he&rsquo;s so bad at gaming.


Right. He&rsquo;s absolutely hopeless. (laughs)

Sakai-san is another fellow who has a long history of designing games with us. Not only is he a talented musician, but he also acts as our Beginner Guinea Pig. He&rsquo;s helped us out quite a lot.
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I&rsquo;m afraid he is so bad that no one can officially ask him to even become a game-testing Guinea Pig, though. (laughs)


Did you make a point of asking him to help out this time around?


Not really. He just happened to be around when I needed him and played the game for several days. It was then that our hopeless Sakai-san cleared the Easy level.