When are Peppy and his barrel special?
This information about the Super Smash Bros. franchise has been pressing for a while now, but thanks to compilation efforts from Source Gaming we find an interesting bit of ‘what could have been’ history as Masahiro Sakurai comments and shares pieces of information about characters that they were considered, as if even almost made it to one of the Smash titles.
Sakurai notes that when designing the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64, his team briefly considered making the alternative colors of Fox him into his crewmates Peppy Hare, Slippy Toad and Falco Lombardi. While Falco would eventually become his own character in Super Smash Bros. Melee and beyond, the other two would have to arrange to be background NPCs and trophies.
While Falco and Fox, which initially existed mostly as echoes of each other with many recycled assets and only slight differences, have a lot of overlap in their designs, the older Peppy and the smaller / round Slippy probably would not be at the mold fit like.
While it would have been fun to manipulate the somewhat nasty frogs and wise old hair over Final Destination of Hyrule Castle, both would require almost unique designs to make sense. It is understandable that such an endeavor would have become too great for the Smash team’s scheme 20 years ago.
Other characters, such as Marth, would come a lot closer to actually making the Smash 64 roster. Sakurai was fully on board with getting the Fire Emblem character, but he was eventually blocked by time constraints and deadlines.
Although the team simply could not make room for Marth, there were others who were won cut or only briefly considered thanks to other restrictions.
Claims that larger boss characters Mewtwo, Bowser and King Dedede were planned and partly developed for the first entry of the franchise are somewhat prevalent, although how concrete plans were a bit hazy because the documented accounts give us only small pieces of ‘ provide the full picture.
As we now know, many of these wishlist fighters have won by making their way into future Smash titles. There was a good bit of red tape (especially in the early days) when it came to getting characters from third-party companies like Rare.
It was not lost on developers that Banjo and Kazooie were prime picks for the Smash universe, in theory, but legal issues led to what we can now call a good two-decade delay in their recording.
While he probably wouldn’t be a frontrunner today, James Bond was red hot in the gaming community in the late 1990s thanks to Goldeneye 64. Not only was this also a Rare title, but it used the likes of Pierce Brosnan and presented a few others immutable obstacles.
64-bit Pierce Brosnan strikes a position at the end of the Silo mission in Goldeneye 64
Sakurai addressed this idea of putting 007 in Melee during one of his routine responses to the online News Flash! Smash Bros. Dojo !! forum.
“Show realistic guns = not good! Character uses the likeness of an actor = not good! Since the original game is based on a movie, he gets those rights = not good! He is the property of Rare = not good! Blocked at all fronts, “concluded the chief developer.
There’s much more in the way of characters, stages, items, and more that for one reason or another are on the cutting edge of Smash Bros. Be sure to check out the full Source article to see them all.
This memory comes all thanks to the work and reporting of PushDustIn, so a big thank you to him for chatting conversations and holding and carrying on the fighting game community.
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