Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros series is quite possibly one of the greatest ideas of all time – let’s take beloved video game characters from the last few decades and have them battle it out – but the next entry in the long running franchise will lose two of its greatest advancements: a single-player story mode and cut scenes. These enhancements were introduced in 2008’s Super Smash Bros Brawl, and were lauded by many Smash fans, myself included, and now they will be no more.
In a recent interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu series director Masahiro Sakurai broke down his decision to remove them from the development process simply: He feels that the experience of watching the game’s planned cut scenes will be ruined by interned users uploading the videos to the internet.
Here’s the full quote as translates by Forbes:
“Unfortunately, the movie scenes we worked hard to create were uploaded onto the internet. You can only truly wow a player the first time he sees [a cutscene]. I felt if players saw the cut scenes outside of the game, they would no longer serve as rewards for playing the game, so I’ve decided against having them.”
This isn’t the first time that Nintendo has taken a hard-line stance against videos of their games being available online. Earlier in the month they temporarily blocked one of the largest fighting game tournaments from broadcasting videos of Super Smash Bros Melee only to have a deal struck at the eleventh hour. The Big N has also had an “anti let’s play” stance in the past as well, with their attempts to claim ad revenue from user created videos on YouTube.
I personally think Nintendo is taking the defense of its intellectual property a little too far here. I get that they can’t sit idly by and allow their games to be outright ripped off, but to take down video walkthroughs and diminish other people’s work by claiming what small amount of ad revenue they receive is just petty. Nintendo I’m not expecting you to allow me to make a boat load of money from my proposed fan made Mario sequel “Princess Peach XXX”, but targeting your fans who are doing nothing more than showing appreciation for your games with cease & desists and the removal of videos is the wrong tactic. Add to that the fact that this fear of internet video sharing has lead Sakurai to abandon some of the cooler features from previous games, and you can see that Nintendo is taking the wrong position here.
What do you think?