In 1999, Nintendo released the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64.
The whole idea of a fighting game featuring Nintendo characters was a little controversial for the time. Some wondered whether it was too violent for a Nintendo game, whose reputation was just as family-friendly in the ‘90s as it is today, if not more so. It was created by Masahiro Sakurai and HAL Laboratory, who felt that fighting games had become too complicated and wanted to make something that was different and more accessible than what was on the market.
So while Super Smash Bros. is a fighting game with Nintendo characters beating up on each other, it’s not in the same style as Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, or Killer Instinct. Smash Bros. is more like pillow fighting. It’s rowdy and rambunctious, but there’s no blood and no one gets hurt. It was Nintendo’s first foray into fighting games of any kind, and thanks to Mr. Sakurai and his team, they released the first platform-fighter.
Super Smash Bros. 64 is still a surprisingly playable game, and has aged as well, if not better, than its multiplayer contemporaries on the Nintendo 64. It doesn’t have the ridiculous number of playable characters, stages, and features that later games in the series boasted, but the original Smash might be the best multiplayer game on the Nintendo 64. Keep in mind, this is a console that has Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, and Mario Kart 64 on it. Whether those games have aged as well as the original Smash Bros. is an interesting debate.
There are eight playable characters, with four more you can unlock, to go along with nine stages, with one more you can unlock. It has one ten-stage single-player mode, a versus mode, and a training mode, which includes the individual target challenges and platforming challenges for each character.
By today’s Smash Bros. standards, that’s a bare-bones, content-paltry game, but by 1999 standards, it was perfectly serviceable.
Where the game hasn’t aged well at all is its visuals. While the stages don’t look too bad, and some stages like the Yoshi’s Island stage look pretty good still, it’s the character models that make you grimace. Some of them look bad, even by Nintendo 64 standards, but since Nintendo 64 games in general haven’t aged well graphically, it’s forgivable. Plus, you don’t play Nintendo 64 games in 2020 expecting to be wowed by graphical prowess. You know what you’re getting going in.
Given the phenomenon that Super Smash Bros. has become, with a rabid fan base to go along with it, it’s interesting to see the humble beginnings of the series. Even given its respectable sales at the time, Smash Bros. 64 isn’t the game responsible for attracting the fan base that the series has today, but it is responsible for laying the foundation for Smash Bros. Melee on GameCube and its sequels that has made the franchise more popular with each installment.
VERDICT
The Nintendo 64, with its four controller ports, was designed from the ground up to be a console for local multiplayer games. Along with Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros. is the quintessential Nintendo multiplayer experience. It represents everything Nintendo believes about how multiplayer games should be created and experienced: simple to learn, hard to master, and easy for anyone to pick up and play and have fun with, no matter their skill level with video games. So if you’re ever in the market for a good classic multiplayer game and you run across Super Smash Bros. 64, grab it. It’s still a lot of fun and you won’t regret it.
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