The original storyboard documents for Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 have been discovered online.
David V. Kimball, a marketing director and content creator who has previously made videos about Super Smash Bros. Melee, stumbled across the design documents — drawn by Masahiro Sakurai — by using the Wayback Machine on HAL Laboratory's website.
Sharing the panels on Twitter, Kimball came across these while researching for his next video — so it wasn't like he was just browsing the HAL website in search of this artwork. It's a pretty cool find!
The storyboards showcase the opening movie of the N64 platform fighter, which to anyone who's played the original game, is pretty darn iconic. There are instantly recognisable panels, such as Mario sitting on the desk to all the fighters jumping onto the screen at once.
Using Google translate, the HAL Labs website states:
We have selected a scene from the Nintendo 64 software "Super Smash Bros.", a smash hit that has sold over 5 million copies worldwide and is still going strong. We will be revealing the storyboard for the opening screen, hand-drawn by the game planner. You can see the finished product based on this storyboard in "10. Finished Movie."
We'll post a selection of the panels below, but we highly recommend checking out the website via the Wayback Machine yourself. Note, that while the thumbnails appear to be broken, most of the links will actually lead to the storybook panels. However, there were a few we (and Kimball, who says he couldn't "recover all of it") couldn't open at the time of writing this.
Earlier this year marked the end of development for the most recent Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Masahiro Sakurai, who has worked on the franchise since the beginning, is currently working on his YouTube channel, which is also coming to an end pretty soon.
As part of his channel, Sakurai shared some footage of Dragon King, the prototype for Super Smash Bros. He has also talked about the uncertainty of Smash Bros. continuing without him at the helm.
Let us know what you think of the storyboards in the comments.