Super Smash Bros. series creator Masahiro Sakurai has revealed the prototype for the first entry in the series on his YouTube channel.
The creator of Super Smash Bros. has revealed a never-before-seen prototype of the first game in the series before it even contained Nintendo characters. Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai stopped posting screenshots on Twitter and ended his long-running column in Famitsu magazine in 2022, but he replaced them with a YouTube series that is similar in style to the presentations he made in the past for the Super Smash Bros. games.
Sakurai’s YouTube series features videos discussing his theories on game development, offers advice on programming, and talks about the production of titles he has worked on in the past. This includes deep dives into the Kirby series, which he also created. Considering that Sakurai spent nearly the past decade working exclusively on Super Smash Bros. titles (running from the development of Super Smash Bros. 3DS/Wii U and all of their DLC to the release of Kingdom Hearts‘ Sora in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), it makes sense that he would want to relax and work on short YouTube videos that chronicle his career and give advice to those wishing to enter the industry.
The latest video on the Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel discusses the origins of the Super Smash Bros. series. One of the most interesting parts of the video was the first-ever look at a game called Dragon King: The Fighting Game, which was a prototype game that eventually evolved into the first Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo 64. Screenshots of Dragon King have been revealed by Nintendo in the past, but this is the first time the game has ever been seen in motion.
Fans were unsure whether any playable builds of Dragon King existed, as it didn’t appear in Nintendo’s infamous Gigaleak in 2020. The build that Sakurai showed has many of the core elements of the Super Smash Bros. series, with character percentages, being KO’d off the side of the stage, smash attacks, and even a Battlefield stage. The character designs in Dragon King were just humanoid shapes that lacked any special moves, though it’s easy to see that they formed the basis for Captain Falcon during development, based on their shape and attacks.
Seeing Dragon Kings in action for the first time is amazing, especially as many fans considered it to be a piece of lost media that would never see the light of day again. Hopefully, Sakurai will talk about the details of how each character was made in a future video. It could even tie into the launch of Super Smash Bros. on Nintendo Switch Online, as it’s one of the games that was revealed by fans in a datamine.
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