Holism: Super Smash Bros. Brawl and My Music

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

One of the formative events of my teenage life was seeing the Super Smash Bros. DOJO!! update in real time. This was 2007, months before the ‘08 launch of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Brawl’s director, Masahiro Sakurai, had taken to running a daily blog as a way of promoting the super-sized crossover fighting game, updating it even weeks after the game came out exactly fifteen years ago today. Any day could come with the reveal of a new fighter, stage, or item. And on the most special days, he’d have a clip of a new song.

You can’t experience it the same way now thanks to the death of Adobe Flash, but it was exciting. The tracks sounded great, and they all remixed the perfect Nintendo music. 2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee had a phenomenal soundtrack, and this audio was proving itself a worthy successor. But the biggest soundtrack news came on September 7, when Sakurai revealed My Music. It was a system that allowed the game to have multiple songs, which was not exactly a unique or novel premise. But how it used them, and what kind of music it allowed, was exciting. And it became a central part of Smash Bros.’ entire ethos.

Image: Nintendo. Part of the extremely exciting original post.

How My Music works is simple. With one exception, every stage in Brawl has a number of songs that can play for each battle, all of which come from the Nintendo games that served as inspiration for the crossover. While starting a match, the game randomly selects one of them. But the randomness isn’t equal. Songs are unevenly weighted to be more or less likely; in the default settings, typically a few songs will be heavily prioritized and everything else given far less value. The My Music menu shows which ones get preferential treatment through a literal slider, and a player can manually drag each track as far to the left or right as they please. Naturally, they can also listen to each song as much as they please, like a second Sound Test.

This isn’t a system of pure logic. Even if a song is placed as far to the left as possible, there is still a chance (if a painfully minute one) it might be used anyway. And you’re not making an explicit tier list; you can put every song as equally likely. It gives you a lot of power but not total power. But the physicality of the slider and the ease of use is a far more tactile and intuitive way of directing likelihood than asking for a dry percentage—and it provides a satisfying, soft bit of randomness. If you’ve painstakingly curated the excellent thirty-four Castlevania songs of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, you can be confident you’ll get something you like on the Dracula’s Castle stage but with the mild surprise of discovering what that something is.

Image: SmashWiki. The page for Battlefield, the default stage. Brawl generally had soft, more washed-out menus, but the colors used for the mechanic really pop.

That fit Brawl’s general ethos. The game controversially emphasized random elements of play, from accidental mid-fight tripping to dramatic, interactive stage elements. These were castigated upon release, and not without merit. A few of them were actively bad. But lost in the discourse was the value of quiet surprise—which admittedly was easy when many of those features were loud. The possibility that you might get your favorite song… or a song you haven’t paid much attention to is interesting, exciting, and notably unintrusive. It also gives these stages more to do. Repeat matches can be exciting just by playing a song you haven’t heard in a while or at all.

Plus, it gave players more to do by virtue of getting to direct the musical selection. Smash was and remains celebrated for its wide variety of gameplay options. These are most important when it comes to things like randomness, difficulty, and variety. But the music’s part of that too, as it lets players take charge in the presentation. Unlike games that let you import your own music, you’re still working within Nintendo’s framework, not unlike something like Super Mario Maker. But it lets you be part of the production of each match, which is more involved and more exciting than just letting you make up a totally new playlist. The clarity of the slider also ensured that anyone could grok it within moments.

Image: Source Gaming. My Music in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, for the Yoshi’s Island stage Brawl invented. It’s unfortunately hard to get high quality images of Brawl‘s version, so I decided to use the most recent game as an example. But the process is exactly the same.

Alongside the elements of randomness and choice that exist in every game, My Music also solves a problem that’s specific and serious to crossovers like Smash. The game is a celebration of Nintendo’s history, but any fan knows that Nintendo isn’t just games or characters or environments. It’s also music. Audio is essential to the brand and experience. Almost every major game published by the company has at least one famous music track, often many in a rich soundtrack, and they far outnumber the stages over which they play. Just giving one song to a stage (which most fighting games do), or two (which some fighting games, including Super Smash Bros. Melee, do) can’t do justice to that legacy.

Take Melee. There are twenty-nine stages, which means a minimum of twenty-nine songs. Some stages have additional “alternate tracks” that can randomly play, but that only adds so much when A) fewer than half the stages have one, and two share one, B) several have to be unlocked through unexplained ways, and C) that still only adds about eleven songs. Melee’s soundtrack is exquisite, to be clear, but you can’t help but want more. And that’s especially true for fans whose first Nintendo games didn’t get included. If your introduction to Zelda was Link’s Awakening, your nostalgia isn’t gonna be represented beyond a single trophy.

Image: Source Gaming. The countdown to an Ultimate match. Brawl also added the flourish of announcing the track right before the match, the better to help you remember a new favorite.

Let’s use Nintendo’s flagship series as a broader example. Melee has seven Mario tracks on five Mario stages (Princess Peach’s Castle, Rainbow Cruise, Mushroom Kingdom, Mushroom Kingdom II, and the Super Mario World-inspired Yoshi stage Yoshi’s Island). The music mostly reflects the five games that inspired those levels. That includes two versions of the famous Super Mario Bros. “Ground Theme,” as well as individual tracks from Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, and Dr. Mario. That’s not a bad list; it’s probably the best you could do under the circumstances. But you’re still missing iconic tracks from those same games, as well as many other Mario games.

Now take Brawl, the game that introduced My Music. It has seven Mario stages: Delfino Plaza, Mushroomy Kingdom, Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Bros., a returning Rainbow Cruise and Yoshi’s Island, and Mario Circuit (renamed Figure-8 Circuit in future Smash titles). If you followed the same trajectory, you’d have around ten tracks—which is a lot for fighting games, but a pittance in the franchise’s history. Mario’s audio is so famous that even its sound effects are famous, after all.

But looking at the expanded track list for those stages and suddenly the breadth is far wider. Delfino Plaza, Brawl’s main Mario stage, has music from its origins in Super Mario Sunshine—and music from Super Mario World, New Super Mario Bros., and Super Mario 64. Mario Circuit has songs from four Mario Kart games, a medley from two Mario sports games, and even music from Excite Truck and the Japan-only Famicom Grand Prix II. Even discounting how both of these have over twice the music any Melee stage had, that’s a large pool of musical history. You were no longer limited by anything but the data size of all those songs.

Image: SmashWiki. Brawl‘s Sound Test was less fun than play with than the new feature, but it got the job done. And it is cool that you could listen to the music both ways.

The potential of this was significant, and Brawl delivered. The official soundtrack exploded from Melee’s 65 to 258, as did the list of musicians; composers from across the Japanese gaming industry joined up to add one remix or a few. It was part of an expansion on Smash’s part to try to honor as much of its source material as possible. Remixes allowed Sakurai and his staff to represent games that, for whatever reason, couldn’t fit or find another place in the crossover. Classics like A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country 2, Super Mario Land, and the original Metal Gear all joined the crossover exclusively via the soundtrack.

It wasn’t just big games, though. The tracklist also referenced B-tier entries (Kirby Squeak Squad, Fire Emblem Gaiden, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time), as well as games that didn’t even donate characters or stages. Sakurai could literally promote Brawl by announcing that the guy who wrote “Totaka’s Song” remixed music from a 1992 Japan-only Game Boy game. The score was also boosted thanks to a sizable number of songs ported directly from their games, whether beautifully campy Sonic the Hedgehog buttrock or the intense racing themes of F-Zero GX.

This sheer volume of history followed ideas that Brawl, and Melee before it, explored just as thoroughly. It was these two games that really codified the idea of Smash Bros. as an interactive Nintendo library. Fighter gimmicks or palette swaps weren’t just fun features or nods to fans; they were telling a company’s story. That’s true of the music, too, as well as the guest composers (some of whom remixed tracks they wrote years ago). The songs that powered My Music were great to listen to on their own, but they also made Brawl something of a destination. You could spend hours playing with the sliders and enjoying the tunes in this digital theme park.

Image: Nintendo. My Music historically also allows you to alter and control the menu music, adding to that idea of being a producer and not just a player.

There were some odd aftereffects of this system, of course, like unequal song distribution. Sakurai’s Kirby franchise only got one new stage (and an old one, but in a separate problem returning stages got almost no new music), so all twelve of its new songs went to Halberd. Kirby had much less music than Mario, but it was far more concentrated, and not every song was a perfect fit for the darker, more serious stage. Only five franchises—Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon—had multiple new stages, after all.

There were ways to mitigate this, and the largest was how music in the generic “Nintendo” category could be added to a stage’s tracklist. The cavernous Norfair could get music from the 2006 Japan-exclusive Chōsōjū Mecha MG, not just funky, atmospheric Metroid tunes. Retro stages like 75m or Flat Zone 2, which homage games from a time before conventional video game music really existed, could get songs from somewhat younger, musically satisfying vintage works. This only furthered those elements of randomness, surprise, and choice. And if these largely obscure songs were new to players, then organizing their likelihood of appearance was a great way to learn about them.

The extent to which My Music “mattered” is somewhat mercurial, largely because it was so unintrusive. The game wouldn’t have lost a single purchaser without it, and it didn’t inform any of its mechanical strengths and weaknesses. It’s likely many players never even found it; Sakurai likes to bury those kinds of options in menus to not distract from the gameplay. What it did, besides facilitating an excellent score, was create a sense of place and scale. That idea of Brawl—and Super Smash Bros. as a whole—being a sort of Nintendo / fighting game / party game destination needed a soundtrack that was big, deep, and filled with classics. A soundtrack you could spend months discovering. That’s part of why Sakurai put so much effort into advertising the music.

Image: Nintendo. Sakurai bragging about getting thirty-nine songs for a single DLC character, as well he should.

My Music wasn’t adopted into every sequel; Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS didn’t use it, though its counterpart Smash for Wii U did. But its place in the series was instantly cemented. Smash often sells itself not just on its phenomenal gameplay, or its status as a Nintendo crossover, but on its idea of being all things to all people. It’s the game with more characters and modes and general stuff than almost any rival. And the soundtrack is a part of that. Smash Bros. Ultimate ended its three years of post-launch support with over 1,068 songs, almost doubling what Brawl had, and Nintendo made as damn sure as it could that you knew it.

These entries didn’t do a ton to alter the basics; the one that did the most was Ultimate. Alongside letting you manually pick a song before the match, it gave up on careful curation and let every stage use any song from its franchise and no other. This gave almost every stage more music and range, but it also blocked them from getting thematically or tonally fitting songs from other series. Stages from IPs with few tracks, like Game & Watch or Punch-Out!!, effectively had their tracklists slashed. Thanks to being a Yoshi stage, Melee‘s Yoshi’s Island stage lost almost all that Mario World music despite being from Mario World. Conversely, stages with no fighter to tie them to now had over a hundred possible songs, many of which didn’t fit. But that decision still gave every Pokémon stage access to the excellent “Zinnia’s Theme,” and every Mario stage “Jump Up, Super Star!,” so let’s call it a wash.

Image: Nintendo. The structure of the Brawl Dojo also let Sakurai opine on each track he chose to highlight, a feature that largely ended for later games’ blogs.

The thing that’s peculiar to me about My Music is how little it’s been adopted over the years. Many games allow players to add personal playlists, which is cool, but it’s not the same. You don’t really see this backlog of optional, random, and manipulable music. Even Smash Bros. clones like Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl or Multiversus lack something even close to this. Likely it’s a financial reason; Nintendo has both money and a long musical backlog, so they can pay for remixes or offer up fully owned tracks in bulk. And even they’re not immune to this, as a few of Brawl’s songs never appeared again due almost certainly to rights issues. It’s a complex issue that simply costs more effort and money than most companies can reliably spend.

In that sense, then, it’s also perfect. One of Smash Bros.’ coolest and most unique features is unique because it’s tied directly to the company it represents. Nintendo’s music runs through the games, and the system of you use to play it matches their ethos to a tee. My Music gives you some power, and it makes wielding that power tangible and fun. It rewards literally every level of engagement, because the songs will always be there. It’s a fun way to justify a giant score. And it helped series on its path to being a sort of “super game” bigger than anything else. It isn’t a wildly new fighter or a crazy mechanic, but from the moment it was shown off on that blog this one feature became a concrete part of Smash Bros.’ ever-widening ambitions.