At the end of this week’s final Super Smash Bros. Ultimate live stream, after game director Masahiro Sakurai had finished whomping people with Sora’s keyblade, he shared some stats about the game. After a slide quantifying all of the characters featured in Smash Ultimate - unbelievably, over 2,200 once you include Spirits - Sakurai made the comment that this is unprecedented territory for a game collaboration.
He’s absolutely right. Between fighters, spirits, items, Mii fighter costumes, and stages, Smash Ultimate featured over 450 different games. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft characters are all represented in Smash, not to mention games from dozens, perhaps hundreds of different publishers. There’s never been a collaboration between game companies like this before, and for a moment, I even entertained the notion that there never would be again.
Then I remembered Fortnite.
As impressive as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, there’s no denying that Fortnite has become the most well-known game for collaborations and crossovers. At any point today you could load up a Fornite match and see Ryu, a Predator, Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe, Ariana Grande, Aloy from Horizon, Batman, Rick Sanchez, LeBron James and Guggimon all duking it out in Boney Burbs. There have been 47 crossover skins added to Fornite in 2021 alone, with the total number nearing 100. Fornite will eventually surpass Smash Bros. Ultimate as the biggest video game collaboration of all time, but it won’t live up to Smash’s legacy. No matter how many skins and events Fornite adds, it will never be able to match the care and compassion that Smash Bros. puts into every character. In fact, Fortnite’s approach to crossovers-as-marketing will only become more soulless, opportunistic, and depersonalized as Epic’s vision of the Metaverse becomes a reality.
A Smash Bros. fighter is incomparable to a Fornite collaboration. To make Sora as authentic as possible in Smash, Sakurai played every Kingdom Hearts game and, with his team, developed a moveset that successfully adapted the gameplay of Kingdom Hearts into the fighting style of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Sora’s model, animations, outfits, voice, stage, and music are all as true to character as possible, and the same could be said about the other 88 Smash fighters as well. When Carnage joined Fortnite, on the other hand, he had a gun. He, like every other character in Fortnite, is a Halloween costume - meant to be worn for a weekend and shoved into the back of the closet.
This is not to disparage the artists and animators that work on Fortnite, whose work I admire and am often impressed by, but rather to point out the different philosophies behind these collaborations. While Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a celebration of these characters and the games they come from, Fortnite is far more cynical. It’s a shallow, 24/7 costume party if you’re being charitable, and an in-game advertisement if you’re not.
You don’t have to buy into my interpretation, this is exactly how Tim Sweeney himself envisions the future of virtual marketing. In his vision of the metaverse, Sweeney describes a tectonic shift in the way people consume advertisements. “A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn’t going to run ads,” Sweeney said in an interview with The Washington Post last week. “They’re going to drop their car into the world in real time and you’ll be able to drive it around. And they’re going to work with lots of content creators with different experiences to ensure their car is playable here and there, and that it’s receiving the attention it deserves.”
Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve already seen exactly this in Fornite earlier this year when the Ferrari 296 GTB was added to the game. Maybe the hardcore Ferrari fans were pleased, but I hardly think that was the point.
With Smash Ultimate in the rear-view, I fear that this is what the future of crossovers will look like. Today they’re thinly-veiled ads for blockbuster movies and sports cars, but tomorrow they’ll take an even more manipulative, more obfuscated form. These crossovers aren’t made to serve players and fans, they’re created to be more efficient and engaging versions of commercial breaks and bus stop displays. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate won’t always be the biggest video game crossover of all time, but I’m afraid it will be the last one of its kind.