 Alright, before we get into this video I gotta remind you we have a couple giveaways going on. One is for a Nintendo Switch, a PlayStation 5, and an Xbox Series X. The other is for two copies of Pikmin 3 Deluxe, so you can like this video, comment on this video, subscribe to the channel, hit that bell icon, all that jazz, go down into the description to find out how to enter these giveaways, and I wish all of you luck. Alright. So Steve, I can't believe I'm saying this, Steve from Minecraft is part of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Now yes, it makes a lot of sense for Minecraft to be included in the game. There are combat situations in Minecraft, and Minecraft is literally the highest selling video game of all time. It's one of the most popular video games of all time. If not the most popular, well, you know, gotta consider mobile games as well. Obviously Pokemon Go is bigger, but the point is, in terms of traditional video game sales, well, this one's number one, over 200 million. When you consider that, it's easy to see why Steve was included. But did you know that apparently it's been at least five years, if not more, to get Steve into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Now this is according to one of the co-founders of Mahjong. Now Mahjong is the company that controls Minecraft, that company is wholly owned by Microsoft. So yes, Microsoft owns Minecraft, but there has been contract talks according to the co-founder Kaplan. He put out on Twitter, like he says, guess when the discussion started? Any takers? And then he, well, you know, was quoting ZHU Jax to try to see if anyone would guess when conversations started about adding Steve into Minecraft. And he said, hey, three is not enough. It's been at least five years. At least five years to get Steve into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. At least five. It could have been longer, but we know it's been at least five years. Now, what is, why would it take five years? Why would it be such a complicated process? Right? It didn't take five years. I'm sure to get, you know, Banjo-Kazooie approved. So why would it take five years? Well, the thing is, Nintendo was obviously negotiating with Mahjong slash Microsoft. Microsoft probably at the head of the negotiations, given they owned the company. And we know that Phil Spencer has no issue having any of their characters appear in Smash. So the conversation starting is one thing. But Nintendo convincing Sakurai to put this character in is another because think about the work that went in to Steve to get him into Minecraft. This is just according to Sakurai himself. As an example, there's 110 stages now in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. All 110 stages had to be edited for this character to work correctly. For Steve's moveset to work correctly. They had to edit all 110 stages. This wasn't a simple, we're making a character and we've got to balance the game. They had to re-edit all of the stages. This character has had more work put into it, more work to get this character out than any character in the history of the game. Let alone how unique all his movesets are, how very Minecrafty his movesets are, are totally different than any other character in the game. I see people saying he's going to be one of the most annoying characters to fight against. He's also going to be one of the funnest characters to fight with. So Steve is in the game and I have a feeling that we have known and that Nintendo and Sakurai have known that Steve from Minecraft was going to be in the game before Super Smash Ultimate even came out. Before 2018, before this game landed in December of that year, they knew that Steve was going to be added as DLC. Now you might be like, well if they were negotiating five, six years ago, why wasn't Steve included in the base game? Again, look at the work that needed to be done to make him work. Sakurai even admitted that hey, of course we'll put him in, but he didn't really want to put in the work to do it, but he did. So Steve has probably been in the work for a couple years. I mean even before the release of Piranha Plant, I would not be surprised if a small team was working on Steve. He is such a unique character and he is one that would take a small team along the way to put together. This isn't someone that they could have slapped together in six months. This isn't a Super Mario 3D All Star situation. This isn't even an amendment. They probably got amendment slapped together in six months. That's not going to work with Steve because of how his mechanics work and how much testing had to go into and then obviously the eventual realization, hey, we really like how Steve plays, but unfortunately in testing it doesn't really work well the way the stages are currently constructed. We need to edit all the stages and how are we going to edit all these stages without upsetting people? We don't want to fundamentally change the stages that people know and love, so how do we edit them just right to make Steve work? And so they had to figure that out as well. So when you consider that, Steve for Minecraft is the most work Nintendo and should really give it to Sakurai and his team have had to put into a character possibly ever. So because of that, because of that, it's not surprising that it's taken so long to get him in. Because after all, Nintendo and Microsoft and Mahjong probably all agreed at least five years ago to get the character in. It did not take five years of negotiating for Microsoft to approve Steve being in Minecraft. But let me be clear, they started talks at least five years ago about getting Steve into the game. I guarantee you with Phil Spencer at the head, those talks lasted all of 10 minutes in terms of actually having approval to put the character in the game. At that point, then it's just a little contractual thing, like you have the lawyers kind of drop some contracts, you sign them, what's Nintendo going to pay them for that character to be present? Or is Microsoft going to pay Nintendo for that character to be present? Is there going to be any profit sharing? How many assets are going to be handed over? All that jazz. It gets put in a contract when you're getting a third party character. But that's not the thing. There was probably no issue getting this done. And again, we found this out from one of the co-founders of Mahjong. He's like, hey man, this is going to be a thing for a long time. And it's curious that this deal happened so long ago and it never leaked. It never leaked. There wasn't a single leaker out there saying, hey, like, dude, Nintendo and Microsoft and Mahjong are talking, obviously Steve's going to be in Smash. That never leaks. We see character leaks sometimes. And sometimes those character leaks are 1,000% correct, but not this time. Nobody was leaking Steve from Minecraft. People just really wanted him because Minecraft is such a big game. And he's such a popular face of that game. Obviously, they included Alex as well. They included a creeper as a zombie and then obviously Enderman. But again, those are just skins. I am very, very thrilled to see Steve get in and have Minecraft represented. And I'm more curious about the fundamental behind the scenes workings on this stuff. Because if you guys don't know, I'm not like the biggest Smash fan in the world. I really, really like Smash Bros. It's the only fighting game I actually enjoy. I don't like the fighting game genre that much. But even then, I still don't play Smash that much. I honestly don't. I've probably logged, I think, 30 hours in the Smash, which is nothing. I don't even have all the characters unlocked. I didn't bother to buy all the DLC. Maybe I'll buy all the DLC at the end of the day so I can have it after. I'm going to unlock all the characters because I don't think we're ever going to get a Smash game like this again. So I'm kind of taking my time. I don't really feel like I need to rush to unlock everyone. I think unlocking characters is part of the fun of Smash Bros. is like when you're playing it by yourself. Yeah, they have that single player mode, but it's really fun unlocking characters. So I like unlocking them. I don't want to rush through it. I know a lot of people just want to rush through and complete the roster. And most of you guys probably have a completed roster right now. But I like taking my time because it just creates more reasons for me to play over the years. But honestly, I'm kind of just at shock. Like I presumed a lot of these DLC characters were decided pretty close to after the game went gold. And it would just be kind of, hey, look, it takes us X amount of months to get a character done and put in the game three to six months. So we're going to announce a new character every three to six months, get the character in the game, release it, work on the next one, work on the next one. But this is the one character that I feel like they've had people working on since even possibly before Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out when they realized it was going to be such a big undertaking like this character was probably originally supposed to be part of the first DLC pass, but it just it took so long that, hey, look, we're going to do a second DLC pass. Let's just put him in there and get another character. And, you know, maybe that's why they grabbed, you know, certain characters that they did at that time, you know, I'm talking specifically a first party character to replace a slot that might have been saved for Steve in the first pack. So I have a feeling that like when you look at that first pack of DLC, a lot of people were disappointed with that last character release. Like, oh, it's the final character. And this is before they announced it, you know, there was going to be more DLC. People seemed a little bit disappointed about that final character because I think the final character was supposed to be Steve from Minecraft. Let's just be honest. It was supposed to be Steve from Minecraft, but he wasn't done. So they had to slip someone else in that slot. And then Steve had to move over to this one. Because if you think about it with Banjo-Kazooie, you know, you Joker, you had a lot of big names announced in that first five DLC, like ending with Steve would have been a great end to that DLC pack. But it is what it is. We still get it in the second wave here. We're going to get more of this tomorrow. They're going to be showing more of the game off, more gameplay of Steve in Minecraft. So I'm excited. I'm glad this happened, and I think you guys are, too. But I just wanted to take a look back at the history of this character and how that it even got into Smash. Thank you guys so much and I'll catch you in the next one.