The “Bros” part of Super Smash Bros. has always been a bit of a mystery, but series creator Masahiro Sakurai has shed some light on what it means.
For the most part, the name Super Smash Bros. title makes a lot of sense – super, because, well, Super Mario, Super Nintendo Entertainment system, Nintendo just used it a lot. Smash, because they’re hitting each other. But then you get to Bros. Yeah, sure, there’s Mario and Luigi, but I don’t think Link and Pikachu are brothers, at least not the last time I checked. But thankfully, in Masuhiro Sakurai’s latest video on his Creating Games YouTube channel, the creator of the series spoke of some of his memories of Satoru Iwata, the late former president of Nintendo Japan. In that video, he shared that it was actually Iwata who helped come up with the name.
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“Mr. Iwata also had a part in coming up with the name Super Smash Bros. We had team members suggest a bunch of possible names and words we might use, then held a meeting with Mr. Shigesato Itoi to determine what title we wanted to go with, and Mr. Iwata is the one who picked out the ‘brothers’ part,” Sakurai explained, Itoi being the creator of the Earthbound/ Mother series. “His reasoning was that, even though the characters weren’t brothers at all, using the word added the nuance that they weren’t simply fighting – they were friends who were settling a little disagreement.”
It isn’t all that surprising that Iwata helped come up with the name, as there have been plenty of stories from Nintendo devs over the years who have said all the things he’s done, big and small, to help see a game through to the end. The full video is well worth a watch for more little Iwata tidbits, though prepare yourself to get a bit emotional as the topic of his illness does come up briefly.
This is also seemingly the second to last video Sakurai will be uploading to his YouTube channel, as back in June he shared that he had already recorded his final video. Based on a machine translation of this tweet, there should be one more video left from the creator, so if you’ve not checked any of them out yet, and you’re interested in game development in any capacity, you better get watching.