Classic Masahiro Sakurai interview details the process of securing characters for the original Smash Bros.

The Smash Bros. series has become a celebration of gaming in general over the years. Nintendo's biggest and brightest stars rub elbows with characters from third party franchises in order to battle it out for supremacy. Nowadays, fans speculate wildly about just who could make an appearance in the franchise.

As you well know, the Smash Bros. series didn't always feature third party characters. Back with the first installment, it was a Nintendo-only affair. Still, bringing those characters together was no easy task! In a Nice Games interview from 1999, Masahiro Sakurai details the process of locking down Nintendo's characters for the original Smash Bros..

The first person I asked for permission was Shigesato Itoi. Next was 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 thir 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!”

Personally, as the creator of Kirby, I understood how they felt: I would feel be really upset if Kirby was featured in a game that people ended up disliking, or if the people got his image and movements wrong. In fact, there had been times when I’d been kind of annoyed by the way Kirby was depicted in someone else’s illustration or as a game cameo. Smash Bros. was conceived, in part, as a reaction against that kind of sloppy handling. I imagine anyone who creates a character feels similarly protective, but Smash Bros. brought an unprecedented number of different characters together and it was of the utmost importance to us that we re-create their personalities and characteristics faithfully. I absolutely did not want to betray the original characters’ creators.