It started without any Nintendo characters
Masahiro Sakurai built the prototype in secret, with four featureless figures knocking each other off platforms. It was called Dragon King, and it had nothing to do with NINTENDO at all. Only once the fighting felt right did he propose dropping famous characters into it, expecting to be told no.
He was not told no. The first game arrived in 1999 with a tiny budget and low expectations, nearly stayed in Japan, and instead founded a series that has sold tens of millions. The 2018 edition assembled every FIGHTER who had ever appeared in any Smash game, a CROSSOVER ROSTER advertised in three words: everyone is here.
Nobody has a health bar
Most fighting games drain a bar until someone collapses. Smash inverts it. Each FIGHTER carries a DAMAGE PERCENT that climbs as they get hit, and the higher it goes the further they fly when struck. You never run out of health — you get lighter, and eventually a hit sends you off the STAGE entirely for the KNOCKOUT.
That single change is why matches stay tense. A player on 140 per cent is in serious trouble but not beaten, and can still land one clean hit on somebody careless. It also makes the danger visible to spectators: you can see who is about to be launched without understanding anything else about the game.
A bug that became a technique
The 2001 game Melee let players air-dodge diagonally into the ground, and the physics engine converted that downward momentum into a fast slide along the PLATFORM. It was never designed or intended. Competitive players found it, named it wavedashing, and built a whole style of movement on top of it.
Nintendo removed it from later games. Melee players simply carried on playing Melee, and still hold tournaments for a game released over twenty years ago — one of the longest-running competitive scenes in any video game, kept alive entirely by the people who play it.
A jukebox with a fighting game attached
The 2018 game carries somewhere north of eight hundred pieces of music, gathered and re-recorded from across the history of NINTENDO and its guests, which makes it one of the largest soundtracks ever assembled in a single game.
You can sit on any STAGE and choose what plays, and the handheld version has a mode for listening to it with the screen off. A fighting game that doubles as a music library is an odd thing to build, and entirely typical of this series.
Two games in one box
Smash manages to be two entirely different games depending on the settings. Turn ITEMS on, pick a STAGE with moving hazards, and it is joyful chaos where a six-year-old can beat an adult because a crate landed in the right place.
Turn items off, choose a flat stage, and the same software becomes a precise contest of spacing, SHIELD timing, DODGE windows and COMBO execution, played at a level most people cannot follow. Very few games serve both crowds, and this BATTLE between the two ways of playing has been running almost as long as the series has.