Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Super Smash Bros, is one meticulous game designer. Painstaking detail goes into each and every character, stage, item and each song of the ludicrous soundtrack. The upcoming Super Smash Bros Ultimate is no different. The level of detail is astonishing. Some people, however, simply cannot get into Nintendo’s all-star brawler. The action can be seen as too hectic, with little depth. Therefore, it is no surprise that some argue that Super Smash Bros sales are a happy accident. Bill Trinen argues otherwise.
Speaking to Nintendo Life, Bill Trinen spoke all things Smash Bros. He goes into some detail regarding Smash Bros Ultimate. He claims that “the ‘happy accident’ is a myth that [he] wants to dispel.” It’s ridiculous to think that nothing about the series was planned. Like Nintendo didn’t know that Smash Bros could be a hit. Trinen finds the whole thing a touch offensive:
“The assumption is almost that Nintendo didn’t know what it had with Smash Bros. And that actually suggests that Mr. Sakurai didn’t know what he was doing. Whereas very, very specifically, he designed the game even back on the Nintendo 64 and especially on the GameCube, very specifically what we were talking about is a game that anyone can pick up and play, but one that has the incredible layer of depth to it. I mean, we used to play Melee every day at lunch and after work for 10 years. Literally. This went on in the Treehouse for years and years and years. Then we just got too busy.”
Super Smash Bros Sales: A Happy Accident, or Planned all Along?
Mr. Trinen wasn’t alone in this. Personally, I only stopped playing Melee every day once Brawl released. For me, and millions of fellow fans, Smash Bros is a pinnacle of the game world. Super Smash Bros sales are no coincidence. It’s a fantastic series that not only pits all of Nintendo’s characters together in a fight. Smash Bros is a love letter to all things Nintendo. It’s like a virtual museum. There is a stunning amount of depth in each release:
“It was even over all that time, we continued to improve and grow as players because he specifically designed the game with layer upon layer upon layer of depth. It wasn’t an accident. The game didn’t accidentally become that way. He is a meticulous game designer. Every decision that he makes on the game is a planned decision. So what was the ‘happy accident’ wasn’t that the game was designed that way. The happy accident was that people started to discover it, and that became something that people could then relate to one another through and that they can have fun playing with each other. And that created the bond that gave them the inspiration for the community to build that tournament scene. But I do want to dispel the notion that the game wasn’t designed with that in mind, because it very much was.”
Any big game you can think of went through years of planning. The level of detail in Triple-AAA games is astonishing, and Super Smash Bros is no different. Super Smash Bros Ultimate releases exclusively on Switch December 7th.
