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Fun Club How Many Characters in the original Super Smash Bros. did you know when you first played the series?

Which of the original 12 fighters did you recognize?

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With the original Super Smash Bros. turning 25 I figured this would be a fun topic.

Since we have some younger members here on the forum you can just sub in Smash N64 for the first Smash game you played whether that's Melee, Brawl, etc.

So of the 12 original fighters who did you know of already before playing the game?

Mario
Luigi
Donkey Kong
Yoshi
Link
Samus
Fox
Kirby
Pikachu
Jigglypuff
Ness
Captain Falcon
 
Mainly the Mario and Pokemon ones, and I imagine that others are similar. The only one outside that group is Link, in my opinion. Yes, I didn't know who Kirby was before this game.

Thank you for reading.
 
For me I played the first Smash on N64 when I was like 6. lol

So I mainly bought the game for the characters from the Mario and Pokémon casts. Meaning I didn't have prior gaming experience with Link, Kirby, Fox, Samus, Ness, and Captain Falcon. I may have been exposed to Link, Fox, and Kirby in some way cause they did have prominent N64 and GameBoy games at the time. The other 3 though I had zero idea who they were when I played Smash.
 
I knew everyone except for Captain Falcon, because I didn't even know F-Zero was a game that existed back then. Everyone else, I'd either already played their games or seen their mugs in gaming magazines.
 
I knew all of them except Ness. Not surprising, since Earthbound was not available in Europe at the time.
 
I think when I first played Melee I only knew the Mario and Pokemon characters.

I can still remember thinking things like that Ganondorf was an actual clone of Captain Falcon, the way Mewtwo was a clone of Mew. I thought Mr. Game & Watch was a silhouette of some enigmatic figure, I don't think I ever actually unlocked him until Brawl. I thought the entire DK Rap was about Donkey Kong, and it was talking him up as this tall tale figure with a bunch of unusual abilities.
 
Everyone but Kirby, Samus, Fox, Ness, and Captain Falcon. So like, half the cast.

Of course I was more vetted when Melee came around, though Game & Watch surprised me. I thank that game/character for getting me interested in playing retro games.
 
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Even in the 90's I was a massive loser with no friends who spent all his time looking over video game content. I know who everyone was not just in Smash 64, but in every Smash game.
 
My first one was Brawl, and I only knew the Mario (including the Kongs, Wario, and Yoshi here)/Pokemon/Kirby characters and Sonic. Everyone else was new to me.

DK and Diddy were kind of in a weird middle ground for me, though. I knew they existed thanks to Mario Party and Mario Kart and about the og arcade game, but I had no idea the rest of the DK series was a thing until Brawl.
 
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The only characters in Smash I never knew who they were until I saw them in Smash Bros were Captain Falcon, Ice Climbers (I think), and Mr. Game and Watch. I've been fine ever since.

I didn't have F-Zero growing up. I think I knew F-Zero existed, but I didn't know Captain Falcon did. I was very surprised Ness was in the original game. When I first encountered him in game I did a double take since I grew up with Earthbound since my brother had it, but I didn't play it much myself. Ness felt special as a result.
 
When I was young (6), I thought Captain Falcon was specifically a Smash original character until I read his bio, because he seemed too raw and different from the typical Nintendo character.
 
I didn't know Ness. I hadn't played an F-Zero, Star Fox, or Metroid game yet, but I knew the characters thanks to the monthly game magazine my father bought for me since I was 10.
 
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Everyone but Ness and Captain Falcon.

I recognized Samus but didn't know about Metroid games themselves due to not having any Metroid games around me growing up. Older sibling who had a NES didn't have Metroid and we never had a SNES to experience Super Metroid.

Fixed that later though!
 
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Everyone except Ness and Captain Falcon and Samus. (I wasn't introduced to Metroid until Prime)

A funny spin on this thread would be to ask that question about Smash Ultimate too. I can imagine that younger Nintendo fans have no clue about Mr. Game & Watch.
 
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Fox, Samus, Captain Falcon, and Ness were new to me when Smash 64 came out.
 
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Just the Mario and Pokemon characters, really. And I guess probably DK (I'm thinking I'd have thought of him as a Mario character at the time because of things like Mario Kart and Mario Party, but the Smash games obviously consider him a separate thing)

Smash was really my introduction to the wider world of video games. Before that I wasn't so much a video game fan as I was a Pokemon fan, but also my parents had an old NES with the original Super Mario Bros and I'd played a couple multiplayer Mario games at friends' houses.

By the time Melee came around I was a bit more versed in this kind of stuff, though Falco, Ice Climbers, Game&Watch, and the Fire Emblem characters were still unknowns to me. I definitely learned a lot pouring over the trophy descriptions though
 
All of them except:
  • Fox and Samus: I think I had a very vague notion of them existing but no real clue;
  • Captain Falcon: Who? But he's cool as hell!
  • Ness: A friend of mine nicknamed him "the lil' genius boy". We thought he was something like a young scientist with psychic powers.
 
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some of my earliest video game-related memories are watching my older brother and cousins play Melee, so it was my first impression for pretty much every character and series in the game outside of Mario and Pokémon!

(it will always be funny to me that watching them Melee became the basis for my biggest obsession in life, whereas for the people actually playing, it was just a fun little multiplayer game with a bunch of characters they didn’t know or care about either.)
 
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BlackthornOrion said:
Just the Mario and Pokemon characters, really. And I guess probably DK (I'm thinking I'd have thought of him as a Mario character at the time because of things like Mario Kart and Mario Party, but the Smash games obviously consider him a separate thing)

Smash was really my introduction to the wider world of video games. Before that I wasn't so much a video game fan as I was a Pokemon fan, but also my parents had an old NES with the original Super Mario Bros and I'd played a couple multiplayer Mario games at friends' houses.

By the time Melee came around I was a bit more versed in this kind of stuff, though Falco, Ice Climbers, Game&Watch, and the Fire Emblem characters were still unknowns to me. I definitely learned a lot pouring over the trophy descriptions though
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Very similar to my experience, except with Melee instead of the first game and a copy of SMB3 that came with my GBA instead of the original on NES. I got Melee in the first place because I was intrigued by seeing Pikachu on the box of what looked like a Mario game. I don't think I knew Donkey Kong though, because I didn't have any context for Mario beyond that one game.

The trophies were my introduction to basically everything. The writing of the descriptions gets progressively less interesting as the series goes on unfortunately, with the Smash 4 ones being mostly lame jokes, but the Brawl ones were still important because of the broader range of them. Melee had no DK trophies besides Dixie and K. Rool due to something involving Rare that fell through due to the game's heavily rushed development iirc, so almost all my knowledge of that series came from Brawl instead.

This was a different time for the internet. These days you could just read a Wiki or look up a full playthrough, which is probably part of why trophies are gone. But it wasn't quite the same back then. I could go online and look at a game's website or read all the Gamespot reviews for a series, but YouTube was just getting started, the Mario and Zelda Wikis didn't even exist until around the same time as YouTube, I didn't have my own computer, and smartphones wouldn't become ubiquitous for a few more years and wouldn't stop burning your hand when you used the browser for a while after that. I was part of the last generation that didn't grow up immersed in the internet, which is always weird to think about.
 
Stilt Village said:
Very similar to my experience, except with Melee instead of the first game and a copy of SMB3 that came with my GBA instead of the original on NES. I got Melee in the first place because I was intrigued by seeing Pikachu on the box of what looked like a Mario game. I don't think I knew Donkey Kong though, because I didn't have any context for Mario beyond that one game.

The trophies were my introduction to basically everything. The writing of the descriptions gets progressively less interesting as the series goes on unfortunately, with the Smash 4 ones being mostly lame jokes, but the Brawl ones were still important because of the broader range of them. Melee had no DK trophies besides Dixie and K. Rool due to something involving Rare that fell through due to the game's heavily rushed development iirc, so almost all my knowledge of that series came from Brawl instead.

This was a different time for the internet. These days you could just read a Wiki or look up a full playthrough, which is probably part of why trophies are gone. But it wasn't quite the same back then. I could go online and look at a game's website or read all the Gamespot reviews for a series, but YouTube was just getting started, the Mario and Zelda Wikis didn't even exist until around the same time as YouTube, I didn't have my own computer, and smartphones wouldn't become ubiquitous for a few more years and wouldn't stop burning your hand when you used the browser for a while after that. I was part of the last generation that didn't grow up immersed in the internet, which is always weird to think about.
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Not only the writing got lame, but the models too. Melee trophies tried to imitate the OG game art style, and sometimes a specific artwork.

Trophy61.png

DrMarioLesson.png


They made each trophy from scratch, and they all felt unique. In Brawl and 4, they just used the 3D models from other games. Though at least in Brawl we got the Kirby trophies from the canceled GC game, and DK had a ton of trophies made by internal 3D models.

Trophies were probably a huge resource hog and I get why they got simplified and then scrapped, but some of the magic (namely, the vision of Smash as a Nintendo Museum) was lost.
 
I knew Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Pikachu and Jigglypuff (I was big on the Pokémon anime, but I didn't play the games back then);

Link - "the elf guy"; never even heard about Zelda when I was at that age;
Samus - "the robot", same as above... though I have vague memory of seeing Super Metroid being played by one of my older cousins;
Fox - "uuh... fox...", completely unknown to me;
Kirby - I thought he was a Pokémon from the new generation that I didn't know; I was aware of the "little ghost guy" from the box art of Kirby's Dream Land on a rental store, but I didn't associate;
Ness - lol
Captain Falcon - I played a lot of F-Zero, but I didn't catch that the character was from this game;
 
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Realistically I don't think I played a Metroid Game before Smash 64, same for Starfox. Fzero and mother/earthbound, I definitely did not.
 
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I remember believing Ness was the main character of StarTropics since he uses a yo yo, and I hadn’t played Earthbound at that time.
 
Gingerbread Man said:
Not only the writing got lame, but the models too. Melee trophies tried to imitate the OG game art style, and sometimes a specific artwork.

Trophy61.png

DrMarioLesson.png


They made each trophy from scratch, and they all felt unique. In Brawl and 4, they just used the 3D models from other games. Though at least in Brawl we got the Kirby trophies from the canceled GC game, and DK had a ton of trophies made by internal 3D models.

Trophies were probably a huge resource hog and I get why they got simplified and then scrapped, but some of the magic (namely, the vision of Smash as a Nintendo Museum) was lost.
Click to expand...

They replaced them with making actual trophies of the characters you could put on your shelf, a completely worthy tradeoff.

I'm being quite serious when I wonder if that Amiibo are part of the reason they felt they didn't need those in game ones much anymore, since its clear that making RL versions of the trophies was the original inspiration for the whole idea of Amiibo to begin with.
 
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CyberWolfJV said:
I knew Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Pikachu and Jigglypuff (I was big on the Pokémon anime, but I didn't play the games back then);

Link - "the elf guy"; never even heard about Zelda when I was at that age;
Samus - "the robot", same as above... though I have vague memory of seeing Super Metroid being played by one my older cousins;
Fox - "uuh... fox...", completely unknown to me;
Kirby - I thought he was a Pokémon from the new generation that I didn't know; I was aware of the "little ghost guy" from the box art of Kirby's Dream Land on a rental store, but I didn't associate
Ness - lol
Captain Falcon - I played a lot of F-Zero, but I didn't catch the character was from this game;
Click to expand...

My sister also thought Kirby was a Pokémon at first too. lol

I eventually did play Kirby 64 and that was my proper introduction to the character but yeah I don't think I touched a Kirby game before Smash, and my knowledge at best would've come from friends.
 
Back then I hadn’t yet gotten into video games as much as I am today, so I hadn’t heard of Samus, Fox, Kirby, Ness, or Captain Falcon. I might not have known about Link at first, either; I can’t remember if I had been exposed to Ocarina of Time before Smash Bros. or not. Pretty sure I only learned that he was named Link from Smash, though.

Embarrassingly, at first I had thought that Kirby was supposed to secretly be a Pokémon; I was just a kid, after all, and my cousin (who was the one who exposed me to Smash in the first place, since he had the game and I didn’t) had told me a rumor that Kirby was supposed to be the Pokémon that MissingNo. was a stand-in for, essentially. I guess it made sense to me as a Pokémon-obsessed kid, and MissingNo.’s Normal/Flying typing (well, I believe it was actually Normal/“Bird”, but the belief was that the “Bird” type was a proto-Flying type, so it still made sense to me) seemed to match with Kirby as well. That and there were the similarities between Kirby and Jigglypuff, too. Of course, it wouldn’t be long before I encountered an actual Kirby game and realized all of that was clearly false, lol.

Gingerbread Man said:
Trophies were probably a huge resource hog and I get why they got simplified and then scrapped, but some of the magic (namely, the vision of Smash as a Nintendo Museum) was lost.
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Spirits fill the same role now, though. Yes, they’re not 3D models, and yes, they don’t have text descriptions like trophies did, but they do have spirit battles as a fun way to provide additional context, and there are far more spirits than there ever were trophies. Speaking as someone who was introduced to the greater world of Nintendo specifically through Smash Bros., and especially via Melee’s trophies, I honestly believe that Ultimate’s spirits do just as well of a job (if not a better job entirely) of introducing people to the wider world of Nintendo. After all, times are different now; in 2001 the internet wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is today, and we didn’t have wikis for virtually everything like we do now either. As such, providing a description for each trophy was kind of necessary. But these days, if a particular spirit catches your interest, you’re probably just gonna look it up on your smartphone, anyway. So the end result is more or less the same, except there are far more spirits now than there were trophies then, plus they have an interactive element to them in spirit battles, too.
 
My first Smash was Melee. I didn't know who Samus was, Falcon, Ness, Roy, or Marth.

(In an embarassing moment, I also didn't know what Japanese sounded like as a kid. So when Roy or Marth spoke, I thought they were talking gibberish which I would imitate.)

Yes, surprisingly I knew who Game and Watch was, because my cousin had a Game and Watch I used to play, and I also played smatterings of Game and Watch gallery. So the term wasn't lost on me.
 
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I can’t recall who I did and didn’t know at the time, but I do remember that I thought Captain Falcon and Captain America were the same character for a while when I was really young…
 
By virtue of knowing about Mario, Pokémon, and Kirby, I knew over half of the roster. Pretty good for a four year old! Smash 64 would be my first introduction to to Link, Samus, Fox, Captain Falcon, and Ness. Funny story - when I was first introduced to Ness, he reminded me a lot of the Pokémon overworld sprites, so for a time, I saw him as Red! But that thought went away pretty quickly.

I think my record for Melee was a lot worse - still did not play any of the aforementioned franchises, and I didn't know anything about Fire Emblem for obvious reasons. At least I knew about Game & Watch by the time I unlocked that final character! Of course, Melee was such an incredible resource for learning about Nintendo of the time that I would recognize a lot of old school Nintendo stuff thanks to it. I'm a lot more varied in what Nintendo stuff I play now, and the Smash games are a big reason for it.
 
Not sure about fox, confident about DK and link. Oh, at least from MK64 I knew DK.
Fox... I think I knew the cover of lylatwars and found the commercial cool, but never made the connection.
 
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Ness is the only one I can be 100% certain I didn't know.

Ambiguous ones are Samus and Captain Falcon. I have a very early memory of possibly playing Super Metroid when it was new, but I can't really be sure. I vaguely knew of Metroid, but I don't think I'm confident enough in saying I really knew who Samus was at the time, so I didn't check that one off.

I had played F-Zero X before Smash Bros. came out so I was definitely aware of Captain Falcon even if I didn't know him super well or know his name off the top of my head. But because I know for a fact I played F-Zero X beforehand and he's the mascot character, I checked his name.

Everyone else I was very familiar with beforehand and had played their games.
 
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Samus, Captain Falcon and Ness were it for me. Oddly enough I had played F-Zero and not Kirby, yet somehow I knew who Kirby was but not Falcon?
 
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All except Ness and Samus. I wasn't into gaming during the SNES era.

Bowser was the most recent I'd found out about, via Mario Party (Mario 64 didn't appeal to me). And I'd seen references to Donkey Kong Country and Kirby's Dream Land in Nintendo Power. The Mario Bros. were iconic, and all the others were mainstream in the N64 era.
 
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