Super Smash Bros. Brawl was the coolest thing ever as a kid. I already loved Mario, Sonic, and Pokémon, so to see all of those characters together in one game, along with a bunch I’d never even heard of, piqued my excitement like no other game could. Finally getting to play Brawl after months of convincing my parents that a Teen ESRB rating was no big deal sparked an obsession that would last for years to come.
As a kid with ADHD, I was no stranger to hyperfixations, periods of intense obsessive interest in a specific topic, but none were as long-lasting and passionate as my love for Smash. I memorized every character’s moveset and game of origin, I went out of my way to track down the earlier entries in the series, and I spent mind-boggling amounts of time browsing Smashwiki to soak in more of that sweet, sweet information. Smash games were pretty much my favorite thing ever, even well into my adolescence, with each new game’s release feeling like a monumental occasion. I made friends over our shared love for the series, and through its hyperfixation-friendly crossovers, it introduced me to the wider world of games—which, evidenced by the fact that I’m here writing this, stuck with me a lot.
My relationship to videogames has changed a lot since then. What was a fangirlish devotion to Nintendo has shifted over the years into a deep frustration with a company that, in spite of the many industry-definingly talented creators it employs, seems committed to roadblocking games preservation, steamrolling their own fan communities, and perpetuating the toxic and misogynistic culture that plagues gaming spaces. Nintendo is, at the end of the day, a major games corporation, one of the largest in the world, and as such its practices are driven by a pursuit of profit that proves routinely to be bad for the medium of games and for the people who make them.
Super Smash Bros. positions itself as a celebration of Nintendo and of videogames at large, but is this really a company, or a vision of gaming, that are worth celebrating? Games are a far more diverse medium now than they were when the first Smash game was released in Japan 25 years ago this month, yet its definition of “celebrating gaming” is still having a bunch of Recognizable Characters™ beat the shit out of each other. And especially coming off of 2023, a year filled with both a cornucopia of exciting, boundary-pushing new experiences as well as some of the worst turns for the industry in recent memory, celebrating Smash’s vision of gaming feels almost crass.
And yet, when I talked about my obsession with Super Smash Bros. in the past tense, that wasn’t entirely honest. Even after all this time, I’m still enamored with the sheer coolness of it all, the wow factor of seeing my favorite guys on screen together. Its emphasis on fanservice and often-niche trivia may no longer represent what I love about videogames, but hell if it doesn’t still scratch an itch in my neurodivergent brain. And it’d be one thing if it was just about the games themselves—they are, after all, very fun and superbly well-designed in their own right—but the overall Nintendo fangirl in me never really left either. Despite how much I detest this company and many of its decisions, I’m still there right on time for every Nintendo Direct, I still enjoy the company’s endlessly gratuitous fanservice in products like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and I still give them copious amounts of money year after year. All that’s really changed is that there’s a weird sort of ambivalence to it now.
To a certain extent, this is a paradox almost inherent to games writing. We produce endless amounts of words rightfully criticizing the ways that Nintendo and their AAA ilk hold the medium back, and yet most of us wouldn’t be here if we weren’t also huge fans of the games these companies produce—especially for Nintendo, given their outsized importance within the industry and their vast swath of iconic properties. And to be clear, this isn’t a criticism—of course we’re all here because we love games, and it’s a beautiful thing to be able to have such strong connections to works of art that we love, that mean something to us, even if they are also commodities at the end of the day.
However, there’s a common tendency to wave this paradox off, to separate the games and their developers from the companies that own them, and I think that’s a bit too convenient. Games exist simultaneously as both art and product, and that is especially true of Super Smash Bros. As products these games are essentially elaborate advertisements for Nintendo and their various business partners, and as art they’re uncomfortably close to the kind of IP worship bullshit we’re fed constantly these days from movies like Ready Player One and Space Jam 2. But, dammit, they are still so good, and the fanservice is meticulously crafted to be so much fun that it can’t help but feel like a genuine labor of love.
How can we reconcile these contradictions? I don’t know. Is it wrong to celebrate this series given everything it stands for, or should we put that aside and recognize it for the feat of design and well-crafted fanservice it is? I don’t know that either. All I do know is that Smash’s take on gaming does not represent what the medium can and should aspire to be. I’d like to think that Smash’s vision of gaming, a chaotic playground of sheer unadulterated coolness, can coexist with a more diverse spread of experiences in the medium, but given the current trajectory of game corporations towards ever-centralizing ownership and prioritization of existing IP above all else, the industry has clearly made a choice in favor of one of them.
But hey, I’m still a fangirl; I can’t help myself. So happy birthday, Super Smash Bros. For better or worse.
Hope Pisoni is a student reporter and games writer. You can find her other work at NYU’s Washington Square News and Cooper Squared.