Brawl for All

Originally written for Roger Hernandez's News Reporting and Writing, Spring 2008.

Mario, champion of the Mushroom Kingdom, takes a fighting stance. He adjusts his cap, and turns to his eternal opponent…Pikachu?

Welcome to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. 

With new characters, new features and the ability to play online, the newest entry in the Smash Bros. series has many ways to keep gamers occupied for years to come.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the third game in the Super Smash Bros. series. The series, produced by HAL Laboratories, which began on the Nintendo 64 with Super Smash Bros. in 1999, continued with Nintendo GameCube’s Super Smash Bros. Melee in 2001 and now comes to Nintendo’s newest system, the Wii.

Smash Bros. combines the fighting and party game genres with a healthy dose of nostalgia for Nintendo games of the past. Nintendo uses the series as a showcase for its characters, its games, and its history. Games as well-known as Super Mario Bros. share the spotlight with more obscure games like Ice Climber and Clu Clu Land.

“Several memorable characters compete for brawl supremacy—that’s Super Smash Brothers Brawl in a nutshell, “said Masahiro Sakurai, director of Brawl, on the official website smashbros.com.

Nintendo franchises that did not have as big of a presence in Melee came out in full force for Brawl. The character Pit, from Kid Icarus, went from a single mention in the Trophy feature for Melee to a fully fledged character, undergoing a head to toe redesign in the process.

“I like that he’s different… from all the characters,” said Eric Zales, a Rutgers College junior. “If Pit was not there, I would not enjoy Brawl as much.” 

All of the characters in the first two games are from games made by Nintendo, but Brawl introduces two characters made by “third-party” developers, developers who create games for multiple systems. Solid Snake from Konami’s Metal Gear series and Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega join the game for Brawl, and their additions help gamers answer a question 17 years in the making: What would happen if Sonic and Mario got into a fight? 

“[I don’t know] about playing [as] Sonic, but playing against him sure sucks,” said a Rutgers alumnus who wished to only be identified by his gamer tag, “Skip”.

 The newest Super Smash Bros. came to North America March 9th and gamers across the country lined up hundreds at a time to be the first to walk out of the local GameStop with their own copy, but some gamers jumped the gun, importing a copy of the game from its home country of Japan, where the game came out January 31st. 

Stores from Best Buy, the electronics giant, to GameStop, the largest retail store dedicated to video games, to Wal-Mart’s warehouse chain Sam’s Club opened their doors midnight, March 9th to sell copies of Smash Bros. Brawl. 

According a March 17 press release from Nintendo, Brawl sold over 874,000 units during the midnight release alone, with the first week’s total sales at 1.4 million. At the average retail price of $49.99, Brawl sales fall just short of $70 million in its first week alone.

And it did all of that without the major marketing campaign that Microsoft’s X-Box 360 game, Halo 3, had. Halo 3, the current record holder for highest grossing opening day of any entertainment product, was visible from many different forums, from Slurpees to TV commercials to a new flavor of Mountain Dew called Gamer Fuel named after the game. Smash Bros., however, found its home on the internet. 

The Super Smash Bros. Dojo is a blog maintained by Mr. Sakurai and a team of translators, translating Sakurai’s updates into six different languages or dialects. 
According to Alexa.com’s traffic rankings, smashbros.com is ranked 597 in the world, and 221st in the United States, while Halo3.com, the official website for the newest Halo game, has yet to break into the top 1000. While Microsoft has a grip on cross promotion in traditional media, the Internet goes to Brawl.

Brawl is also one of only 7 games on the Wii to take advantage of Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection, a free service that allows players to compete against each other online free of charge. Nintendo has a warning on their website that the amount of traffic from Brawl may be overwhelming at peak hours, resulting in an error code for some players trying to access the online service during those hours. But for those players who do not wish to always play, there is a mode called Spectator mode. This mode allows players to watch other gamers play and bet coins won in the regular game on the winner.

So what makes Brawl so appealing to its audience? Is it the competitive aspect? Is it the amount of features and extras available to players? According to Nintendo of America, it’s that it has become more than a simple video game.

 "Super Smash Bros. Brawl has made the leap from video game to cultural phenomenon,” said Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway in a press release.

Fans like Dave Cordes, a Rutgers College senior, however, think the answer is easier than calling it a cultural phenomenon.

 “Smash, people say it’s just a game, but, y’know, it’s our game,” Cordes said. “It’s what we do.”