Image: Masahiro Sakurai
Masahiro Sakurai is a YouTuber now, and in his latest video, he showed off a “never-before-seen” clip of the prototype that would eventually become Super Smash Bros. You can feast your eyes on Dragon King: The Fighting Game beginning at 1:25 in the video at the top of this post or jump directly to that moment by clicking this link.
The Dragon King footage is clearly from an early stage of development, but you can already see elements that are now core to the Smash franchise, like percentages representing health, the iconic three-platform “Battlefield” stage layout, and characters flying off the edges of the screen to their deaths. Fighters were just polygonal humans — not Nintendo characters — and they could use moves like smash…
