Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
The Stage Builder in Brawl allows users to share their stages with Nintendo or with their friends.
Nintendo is known as the king of quality, mass appeal gameplay - but with the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii, they may just seize the "connected" gaming crown as well.
On arguably one of the biggest titles of 2008, Nintendo worked with GameSpy Technology to provide Smash Bros. enthusiasts with ways to engage with their game on all fronts, vaulting beyond simple multiplayer to create a multi-tiered experience that embraces user created content and a barrier-busting approach to community building.
The results?
Check the charts - Smash is a smash: one week after its release, Brawl was already the fastest selling title in Nintendo of America's history.
Multiplayer: The Important First Step
Super Smash Brothers Brawl delivered online multiplayer for the first time in the history of the Smash Bros. franchise. It was a simple, but crucial, first step in series' evolution, and Nintendo's implementation of GameSpy's matchmaking SDK service married Nintendo's "make it easy, make it fun" philosophy with our technology's flexibility and backend stability.
Players simply choose a regional or world-wide match and - bam - they're off. All players need worry about is deciding to play matches online - with old friends or new ones - and the game handles the rest.
Lather, Rinse, Relive
There's not much point to a great gaming experience that can't be relived. Nintendo wisely realized that players wouldn't just want to play a game and leave all of the "I can't believe I just did that!" moments in the past. They'd want to capture those moments and watch them again - or better yet, share them with their friends.
Brawl turned that desire into reality, giving players the ability to snag a snapshot of a jaw-dropping instance of gameplay and preserve it - either by saving it to a SD card, or by storing them in an online album for friends to check out.
This is exactly the kind of functionality we had in mind when we design our Sake Persistent Storage system. Nintendo was able to use the system, out of the box, to deliver a non-stop stream of new content to their rabid fans.
Setting the Stage for Years of Fun
Extensible content has long been seen as exclusive to hardcore PC games - but Nintendo knew its passionate Smash Bros. fanbase would want to get in on the action. Super Smash Bros. Brawl busted the in-game / out-of-game community barrier by giving Smash enthusiasts the ability create and share their own stages of the game.
Creators can craft levels to their hearts' content, then make them available to the entire community via websites like IGN's own Super Smash Bros. World, already a repository of thousands of custom levels. Players can download these stages onto a SD card, and then load them onto their Wii.
The result? A perpetually renewable source for playable content that the user community itself can grow, nurture and consume. It will take years for Smash fans to get "bored" of Brawl stages - and the future for stage creators is yet unwritten.
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