In case you missed it, Super Smash Bros.’ Masahiro Sakurai has a unbelievable YouTube channel now the place he shares every kind of cool concepts and tales about video games improvement. Example: in his newest video, he has proven off footage of Dragon King: The Fighting Game, a prototype combating recreation that might pave the way in which for nice issues.

While information of the sport’s existence is nothing new—it’s been reported on just a few instances, is understood amongst critical Nintendo and Smash Bros. historians and a few blurry previous screenshots have circulated—we’ve by no means really seen it in motion earlier than, so getting such a great take a look at it right here (and from the supply, no much less!) is wonderful.

Dragon King’s prototype—which dates again to 1996—was labored on by each Sakurai and Satoru Iwata whereas each have been at HAL Laboratory, and because the video explains was pitched to Nintendo as a standalone recreation earlier than finally changing into {the catalogue}-spanning Smash Bros. sequence we all know right now.

You can immediately see how Smash advanced from this pitch for a “four-player free-for-all fighting game with no health bars”; whereas these are simply clean colored characters, not the Nintendo cameos we’re used to, nearly the whole lot else is Smash Bros. to the core, from the digicam actions to the variety of gamers to the injury proportion.

Perhaps most fascinating, although, are his recollections about how the sequence got here to be recognized for these cameos. Sakurai says that the concept of beginning a brand new combating recreation from scratch, and having to give you 8-12 characters that might be unfamiliar to gamers, wasn’t nice, so he managed to persuade Nintendo to let him “borrow their most popular characters” as a substitute, even when this transfer was wildly unpopular with the corporate’s fits on the time, who strongly opposed “the idea of having Nintendo’s characters beat each other up”.

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You can check out Sakurai’s story, and the footage of Dragon King, below.