I was going through some of my old discs and hard drives and I came across something that I've been trying to find for years: beta Smash Bros. roster information that I typed up waaaay back in 2002.
These notes come from the official Japanese N64 Smash Bros. site and a bunch of old Famitsu magazines from early 2002 (I want to say somewhere between January and April). I'd greatly appreciate any help in relocating some of these articles, because it appears that they've been lost in time. I'm hopeful that there's additional information out there in issues that I haven't had the chance to read.
In the original Super Smash Bros., Sakurai wanted to include some hidden villains: Bowser, Dedede, Wolf (Star Fox 64 was brand new during the planning period), and Mewtwo. However, time and budget constraints meant that Sakurai had to ditch these characters.
Fast forward to Melee: Bowser, Dedede, and Mewtwo were planned for inclusion, but later on Sakurai decided to cut Dedede in favor of adding six clones in his place. (Fans were asking for more characters, so Sakurai figured it would be better to add six clones than to add one original character.) Wolf was going to be one of these clones, but ultimately Falco made the cut because he received more fan requests and because he stood out more from Fox visually. So
Dedede and Wolf were both planned for the first Smash Bros. AND Melee, but they made the final cut for neither. You could say that Dedede and Wolf were eight years in the making.
Just for fun, here's a quick mock-up of what the N64 Smash Bros. select screen probably looked like in terms of placement:
I'm amazed at how conveniently the villains line up below their respective universes. I didn't even have to change the order of any of the default characters!
What does this mean for SSB4? Some of the "Forbidden Seven" might be more likely than we think, given Sakurai's evident propensity for carrying over planned characters into future games.
