 Welcome back to the Video Game Storytime Advent Calendar where today we're learning why Mario is in Super Smash Bros. This must be the most pointless video we've ever done, or is it? It's well known that the original Super Smash Bros. started life as a hobby project for Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata, and that, at the start, the game was called Dragon King, the fighting game. The fighters in the game were four copies of the same basic humanoid fighter. This gave Sakurai a winning idea. He said, I asked to use Nintendo characters since it was so hard to accurately convey to the players the atmosphere of the gaming world where they play a fighting game on home console. You have to have some main characters in a fighting game, and when you line up character 1, character 2, character 3, and so on, the main characters end up blurring together. With the game for the arcade, it's okay for character development to take a backseat, since players are content with the fighting. With a fighting game for the home console, however, you have to set up the general image or the atmosphere of the gaming world right from the start, or else the game suffers. That's why I asked to use Nintendo characters. So in order to make the distinctions between characters clearer in Dragon King the fighting game, the project was reworked to showcase a selection of iconic Nintendo characters, and that is why Mario is in Smash, and Luigi, and Bowser, and Samus, and Fox McLeod, and Ness, and Kirby, and all the others. Join us tomorrow for what we promise will be a slightly more informative video.