 It's time to open another window in the video game storytime advent calendar. Pikachu was among the original roster of characters in the very first Super Smash Bros. game on the Nintendo 64, but the Pokemon mascot very nearly didn't get included in the game. Remember that Game Freak, rather than Nintendo, owns the rights to the Pokemon characters. According to Masahiro Sakurai, there was a lot of negotiation behind the scenes to get permission to include characters. He said, The first person I asked for permission was Earthbound director Shigesato Itoi, next to a Shigeru Miyamoto. When he saw our work, he said, Hey, you've got Mario down pretty good. The Pokemon characters took the longest to get permission, because their image is tightly supervised. I broached the subject with Pokemon company president Tsunekazu Ishihara, but the impression I got from him was that it would probably be difficult. Satoshi Tajiri was more encouraging. He was like, This looks cool. The reception within Nintendo was not very good either. It was like, hey, should Mario really be hitting Pikachu? Is that okay? When it first went on sale, there were people complaining about the idea of Pikachu holding a gun too. But in Smash Bros, your goal isn't to defeat or physically beat your enemy. It's more like a sports game where you score points by knocking people out of an arena. That's why, when someone wins, I made sure to include the sounds of applause for the victor. I didn't include dead bodies or anything like that when players lose all their health. It's all a matter of perception, you see. So Pikachu was included in Smash Bros in part because Game Freak founder Satoshi Tajiri liked the look of the game, and because Masahiro Sakurai tried as hard as possible to make the game look like a sports match. Join us tomorrow for the next Tiny Festive Trivia video.