It's been nine years -- jeez, already? -- since Super Smash Bros. Melee was released for the Nintendo GameCube. The multiplayer fighter wound up becoming the GC's #1 release, with over seven million copies sold worldwide, but as designer Masahiro Sakurai explained in his most recent column for Famitsu magazine, development wasn't exactly fun and games.
"On a personal level, Melee had an extremely grueling development cycle," Sakurai wrote. "Some of my other games did, too, but Melee sticks out far ahead of the pack in my mind. I worked on that game for 13 months straight, after all, without a single Sunday or holiday off that whole time. During parts of it, I was living a really destructive lifestyle -- I'd work for over 40 hours in a row, then go back home to sleep for four."
What drove Sakurai through all that work? "I seriously felt like a man on a mission," he said. "With the original [Nintendo 64] Smash Bros., there was no guarantee the game would be well-received at all -- I had my hands full just trying to make it into the completely new sort of fighting game I had in mind. With Melee, though, the previous game did well enough that Nintendo and the character designers knew what I wanted in advance. And I wanted a lot. It was the biggest project I had ever led up to that point -- the first game of mine on disc-based media, the first that used an orchestra for music, the first with 'real' polygon graphics. My staff was raring to go, and we plunged in full-tilt from the start. I pushed myself beyond any limit I could think of because I doubted I'd ever have this sheer amount of work in my hands ever again."
Looking back, nearly a decade on, Sakurai seems proud of Melee overall. "Melee is the sharpest game in the series," he wrote. "It's pretty speedy all around and asks a lot of your coordination skills. Fans of the first Smash Bros. got into it quickly, and it just felt really good to play."
However, he has one particularly deep regret: the game's accessibility level. "I had created Smash Bros. to be my response to how hardcore-exclusive the fighting game genre had become over the years," Sakurai said. "But why did I target it so squarely toward people well-versed in videogames, then? That's why I tried to aim for more of a happy medium with Brawl's play balance. There are three Smash Bros. games out now, but even if I ever had a chance at another one, I doubt we'll ever see one that's as geared toward hardcore gamers as Melee was. Melee fans who played deep into the game without any problems might have trouble understanding this, but Melee was just too difficult."
Accessibility has always been a watchword in Sakurai's design style, and there's little doubt he learned a lot from the Melee development experience. "If we want new people from this generation of gamers to come in," he concluded, "then we need it accessible, simple, and playable by anyone. You can't let yourself get preoccupied with nothing but gameplay and balance details. That's where the core of the Smash Bros. concept lies, not on doggedly keeping the game the way it was before."
