Every Smash Bros Fighter Reveal That Was Leaked Before the Official Announcement

The Smash Bros. DOJO ran on weekdays from May 22, 2007 to April 14, 2008, and Masahiro Sakurai wrote all of it himself, in Japanese, for a localisation team to push out in seven languages. Nintendo World Report counted roughly 300 updates. It was an extraordinarily disciplined way to reveal a game one secret at a time. People kept getting there first.

Nintendo has been given away by a sticker’s compatibility icons, a storefront filing error, a retitled music video and its own trailer showing a fighter it had not announced. Four of the entries below are not leaks in the ordinary sense at all. Nobody took anything; Nintendo simply published it.

Characters the rumours promised as fighters are not here at all. Isaac, promised more than once, ended up among Ultimate’s fifty-nine Assist Trophies, which is where the series files a character it likes but will not promote. What follows are the disclosures that came true and can be dated, which is a narrower set than the folklore suggests. It runs from a GameFAQs post nobody can pin to a single day through to an anonymous poster who said he worked in music licensing.

The ChaosZero Leak

Nobody can say what day this one actually happened, which is awkward for a list built on dates. SmashWiki dates the ChaosZero post to October 2007 and stops there, with no day and no citation, and GameFAQs no longer surfaces the account’s post history. What survives is the account itself, registered on June 24, 2001, six years before it posted anything worth remembering.

The post named Lucario, Wolf and Sonic as Brawl newcomers, Falco, Ness, Captain Falcon and Ganondorf as returning veterans, Sheik as a Zelda transformation, and Mewtwo as cut. All of it was right. All three newcomers he named had to be earned rather than selected: Lucario by clearing every level of Target Smash, Wolf by beating Boss Battles as Fox or Falco, Sonic by finishing Classic Mode with ten different characters. Brawl locked fourteen of the thirty-five slots on its character select screen behind challenges of that kind, which is a subject in itself: the methods Smash has used to make players unlock a character predate every leak on this list.

The detail that convinced people was not a character at all. ChaosZero described the Dragoon, an item assembled from three collectible parts, and the DOJO did not officially detail the Dragoon until December 28, 2007, roughly two months later. SmashWiki says he was derided as a troll until that update landed.

Whether it beat Sonic’s own reveal on October 10 is unknowable. It beat Lucario’s by four months, which is all this list actually requires.

David Hayter Accidentally Leaks Jigglypuff

An interviewer once asked which Brawl character he would most like to beat up, and David Hayter answered Jigglypuff. Nintendo had not announced Jigglypuff. The whole event is that exchange, and almost nothing else about it survives. The interview was conducted in October 2007 by a channel called UltraNeko, and every copy of it is gone: the original account went down, the reuploads by TheUltraPhoenix and proxyXIII went down or were made private, and no journalism of the period recorded any of it. A single wiki page carries the story. There is no transcript, no verbatim quote, and no day in October that anyone can name.

Hayter was in the game because he voices Solid Snake, who had arrived from Konami as one of the eighteen third-party characters Smash has ever admitted. Both were secrets in their own right. Snake had to be unlocked across 130 versus matches, or fifteen played on Shadow Moses Island; Jigglypuff took 350. Nintendo did not formally confirm Jigglypuff until the following March.

The game itself later staged the joke. Snake’s codec conversation on Shadow Moses has Colonel Campbell warn him about the energy Jigglypuff builds up while it sleeps, Hayter answering on the other end of the line. Hayter spent 2008 discussing Jigglypuff on the record, in character, inside the thing he had spoiled.

The Wii.com Sticker Video

Nintendo posted a promotional clip on January 18, 2008 and left it running all weekend. By Sunday night in America, already Monday in Japan, a few people had noticed something odd about the sticker screen.

Brawl’s stickers were bonuses for the Subspace Emissary, its story mode, and some of them worked only on particular fighters. That restriction is the reason the game drew a little row of eligible character faces beside each one. Highlighting the Groudon sticker, a flat Flame Resistance boost of fourteen, produced a row of exactly four: Pikachu, Pokemon Trainer, Lucario and Jigglypuff. The last two had not been announced. A Claus sticker did the same trick with a shorter row, Ness beside Lucas, which is how a promotional video confirmed Ness weeks before Nintendo got around to it.

The repair is disputed. Engadget said the icons were whited out, Bulbanews said the character faces were removed, SmashWiki says the video came down. Something happened to it quickly.

What makes the slip funny is the schedule it wrecked. Nintendo formally announced Ness on February 1, 2008, Lucario on February 28, and Jigglypuff on March 25, by which point Brawl had been on sale in Japan for nearly two months and in North America for over two weeks. The DOJO was still solemnly unveiling roster secrets to people who had already unlocked them.

The Gematsu Leaks

“My unlikely predictions: Little Mac, Pac-Man, Animal Crossing Guy, Mega Man, Wii Fit Trainer, Mii.” Sal Romano posted that to NeoGAF on June 10, 2013, the night before E3. Three of the six – Villager, Wii Fit Trainer and Mega Man – arrived the next evening. The other three took eight months to a year. Romano founded Gematsu in May 2008 and still edits it. The tip reached him by email from someone he could not name.

The source kept writing. April 2014 brought Shulk, Palutena, Chrom, the Chorus Kids and a Pokemon from X and Y, the last of which became Greninja that same afternoon. By July the emails had hardened into a promise: Sakurai changes his mind constantly, the leaker wrote, but Shulk will not be changed, and the reveal was pinned to July 14.

On July 14, Nintendo revealed Robin, Lucina and Captain Falcon. None had been named. Shulk did not appear, and Chrom surfaced only inside Robin’s Final Smash, which is a cameo rather than a roster slot.

Chrom did not arrive in that game at all. Sakurai explained in his Famitsu column that he had drafted a Chrom moveset and abandoned it, because the character kept coming out as a mixture of Ike and Marth, which places him among the twenty-nine characters Smash publicly considered and turned down. He reached the roster four years later, as an Echo Fighter of Roy. The Chorus Kids never arrived at all, and the leaker stopped writing.

The Jiggensteins Leak

Seventeen karma, one thread, no other contributions of any kind. The GameFAQs account jiggensteins registered on May 7, 2014, posted a thread that month titled Two New Characters claiming Lucina and Robin would both be playable and that Robin would come in male and female versions using magic, and then essentially stopped existing.

There is no source anywhere in the post. No developer contact, no playtesting friend, just the claim and a closing line promising he would not do anyone wrong. The board treated it accordingly, and one reply sarcastically dubbed him Prophet.

Robin and Lucina were confirmed on July 14, 2014, two months on, in the same broadcast that brought back Captain Falcon. Robin came with the strangest resource system in the game: a Levin Sword carrying eight durability points and a Thunder tome carrying twenty, both wearing out through use and regenerating on a timer, or instantly whenever Robin is knocked out and respawns. Lucina arrived as a Marth clone with the tipper taken out, her Parallel Falchion dealing even damage along the whole blade where Marth’s rewards only the point.

The account last logged in on November 4, 2014, a few months after the reveal proved it right. This is the entry that makes the word leak difficult, because nothing in the surviving record suggests jiggensteins knew anything at all.

The Ninka/Vaanrose Leak

A friend of a friend at Nintendo of America’s Redmond offices is not, ordinarily, a citation. In mid-2014 it was good enough. Vaanrose, a Smash community figure previously known for work on the Project M mod, passed word through SmashBoards that Robin, Bowser Jr. and the Duck Hunt dog were all playable, and was right on every count.

The other half of the item belongs to Ninka Kiwi, who started small. Before E3 2014 Ninka claimed only that Mario and Charizard would get new palette swaps, singling out a blue Mario, and supplied recreated screenshots as proof. That checked out on June 10. In July came the real thing: Lucas, Wolf, the Ice Climbers and Snake cut; Shulk, Dr. Mario, Dark Pit, Bowser Jr. and the Duck Hunt dog added; Bowser Jr. fighting from inside the Junior Clown Car with all seven Koopalings available as alternate costumes. Not one detail of that was wrong.

A separate 4chan list circulating at the same time added the Chorus Men, Ridley, Dixie Kong and a base-roster Mewtwo. All four were wrong. The two leaks have been muddled together ever since, which is unfair to Ninka.

Shulk and Robin were announced before the game reached shops. Everything else was settled by Japan’s 3DS release on September 13, 2014, which put the finished roster on shelves where anyone could check. The SmashBoards thread that hosted the whole affair is now hidden from public view.

The Wario eShop Slip

Somebody at Nintendo filed the wrong game in the wrong folder. On July 24, 2014, Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS turned up inside Wario’s own section of the 3DS eShop, a section that gathered every title he appeared in, from WarioWare through to Mario Kart. Smash had no business being there unless he was in it. EventHubs caught it that day and remains the only outlet that did. The listing was pulled the same morning, comfortably after screenshots had gone around.

Nintendo did not confirm Wario until October 3, 2014, alongside Ness and Falco, timed to the Western 3DS launch. That is seventy-one days of official silence about something its own storefront had already filed under his name. Whether he would return at all was a live question that year. Smash 4 was busy dropping Brawl veterans, and Wario had only become playable in Brawl to begin with, having spent Melee as a trophy.

He arrived carrying his WarioWare personality rather than his platforming one. The Wario Waft, his charging flatulence attack, needs 110 seconds of patience to reach full strength, at which point it does twenty-seven percent damage, flashes him orange, and kills a middleweight from around fifty percent near the centre of Final Destination. The WarioWare stage on 3DS is unlocked by unlocking Wario. Nintendo built an entire arena that stays sealed until you earn the man it belongs to.

The Cusco Leak

A few hours was how long the mockery lasted. On August 19, 2014 a 4chan poster calling himself Cusco started two threads naming the Duck Hunt dog as playable, describing the duck riding on his back, giving the pair’s official name as Duck Hunt, and listing Lucas, Wolf, the Ice Climbers, Squirtle, Ivysaur and Snake as cut. He placed Dark Pit between Dr. Mario and Lucina on the character select screen, three clones in a row. He was ignored.

Then the ESRB leak broke the same afternoon and proved him right by accident, which is why anyone remembers him at all. SmashWiki puts his threads several hours ahead of those screenshots; nothing outside that page confirms the order, and contemporaneous coverage of the day never mentions him once.

He got the size right too. Forty-eight characters excluding Mii Fighters is exactly what the base roster holds once the Brawler, Swordfighter and Gunner are set aside, and SmashWiki records no error anywhere in either thread. Nintendo did not acknowledge Duck Hunt until a Miiverse post on October 22, and gave the pair no trailer until November 5.

The character he called is the best joke in the game. Duck Hunt is a dog and a duck, and its smash attacks and its Clay Shooting special are fired by an unseen marksman off screen with an NES Zapper. The PAL trophy text calls him a little helper. He is the third member of a two-member team, and has never once been shown.

The ESRB Leak

Every game submitted for an American age rating comes with a video attached. The ESRB requires publishers to send footage of typical gameplay, missions and cutscenes, including the most extreme content a game contains, before it will assign a rating at all. That requirement is the only reason an unreleased build of the 3DS Smash game existed as footage outside Nintendo’s own walls.

Screenshots reached 4chan on August 19, 2014, video followed on August 25, and between them they exposed Shulk, Ganondorf, Ness, Dr. Mario, Falco, Mr. Game and Watch, Wario, R.O.B., Bowser Jr., Duck Hunt, Dark Pit and Jigglypuff. The build carried the string ESRB0083 on its character select screen. That string gave the leak its name, and for nine years it was the only clue anyone had about where the footage had come from.

Liam Robertson established the rest in December 2023. A Nintendo of America employee had sent the footage to the ratings board as required, the employee’s child got hold of it and passed it to a handful of online friends, and one of those friends posted it. Nintendo traced the trail back and fired the employee.

Somewhere between the submission and the shelf, Nintendo cut a trophy. The leaked build counted 686 of them and the shipped game had 685, and the missing one was Tharja. Asked about any of it at the time, Nintendo said it had nothing to announce.

The Ganondorf Video Slip

A few pixels of a man who did not officially exist sat in the middle of a five-minute trailer. Nintendo Japan uploaded its Smash Bros. 3DS introduction video on August 29, 2014, and there beside Pikachu, at the edge of the frame, was Ganondorf. EventHubs had it flagged by 12:48 that afternoon; Zelda Universe later put the moment at the fifty-five second mark.

The timing is what makes it absurd. August 29 was the day Nintendo formally revealed Shulk, so the company spoiled one fighter inside the trailer it was using to announce another. Ganondorf was not confirmed until October 15, forty-seven days later, and then only through character screenshots posted to the official website rather than any broadcast. A real question sat underneath it. Smash 4 dropped Wolf and Snake outright and removed the Ice Climbers because their two-body mechanics could not be made to run on 3DS hardware, which Sakurai later said he tried and failed to fix. Seniority counted for nothing.

Ganondorf has been playable and unlockable in every game since Melee, where he was a late addition built on Captain Falcon’s frame because his proportions happened to fit it. Smash 4 was the first game in which he could swing a sword at all, and only through an optional custom move. His Warlock Punch still needed eighty-one frames of startup, and he finished 52nd or 53rd of 54 on SmashWiki’s Smash 4 tier list. Roughly where a borrowed skeleton gets you.

The Roy and Ryu Datamine

Reddit had it in April. Nintendo was not planning to say anything until June 14. On April 15, 2015 a user called shinyquagsire23 decrypted update 1.0.6 of the 3DS version and found unused sound files, among them a victory fanfare named snd_bgm_Z83_F_Roy_3DS that simply duplicated the existing Fire Emblem theme, plus two more carrying Ryu’s victory music and his Street Fighter II character theme.

The inference was already a known trick. Mewtwo and Lucas had each been planted in an earlier update as an unused fanfare before their own reveals, so a Roy-shaped fanfare meant Roy was coming, sold the same way. Four days later the same user found five blank fighter slots labelled Mario sitting after Mewtwo’s, while the count of inaccessible stage slots had grown from four to fourteen.

Then it happened again. On June 13, one day before the broadcast, an administrator of The VG Resource pulled the Japanese 1.0.8 update off Nintendo’s own servers ahead of schedule and posted the pair’s ending videos, art, costumes and trophies.

Nintendo went ahead anyway. Roy and Ryu were announced and released the same afternoon, the only pair among Smash 4’s seven paid fighters to manage it, and two of the twenty paid DLC fighters Smash went on to sell. Ryu arrived speaking his own language, a quarter-circle motion producing a stronger Hadoken than the button press does. Nintendo had spent two months watching its surprise walk out of the building, and sold it on schedule anyway.

The Vergeben Leaks

SmashWiki’s ledger of the saga lists two disproven claims in three and a half years, a better record than most people manage professionally. Vergeben posted his first Smash claim to GameFAQs on March 16, 2018, eight days after Ultimate’s teaser: Ridley would be a newcomer, and the game would be built fresh rather than ported. Both landed 88 days later at E3.

What followed reads like a timetable. Simon Belmont, claimed May 16, confirmed 84 days on. Isabelle, claimed July 28, confirmed after 47. Ken, claimed August 18, confirmed after 75. Incineroar he named in September and defended in October in terms he declined to soften, telling doubters that believing it is not Incineroar means you are in denial, but this community lives for living in denial. Banjo and Kazooie he gave a 99 percent confirmation five days out. Terry Bogard he called with two days to spare.

The misses were Square Enix for the first Fighters Pass character, which turned out to be Joker, and Master Chief for the E3 2021 slot, which went to Kazuya. He acknowledged the second eight days afterwards and said he had cut ties with one of his oldest sources.

None of it reached anyone directly. SmashWiki describes the information travelling like a game of telephone, and impersonators got common enough that he had to list his real accounts in a forum signature. His final statement, on September 23, 2021, was that he had heard nothing at all about the last character.

The E3 2018 Booth Leak

Nintendo’s E3 booth was leaking before it had been built. On April 24, 2018 the Twitter user Master0fHyrule posted, then deleted, a claim that Bayonetta, Shulk and Duck Hunt would all return in the still-untitled Switch Smash game, alongside an image he said showed part of a rebuilt Battlefield stage. A day later the YouTuber GU KingofHeart posted, then also deleted, a list of props his source said would be standing at Nintendo’s E3 booth: a golden hammer, Captain Falcon’s helmet, Link’s Master Sword, Marth’s Falchion, Shulk’s Monado, Bayonetta’s handguns and boots, Fox’s Blaster, a Splattershot.

His credibility rested on having called the previous year’s booth, which Nintendo built around Super Mario Odyssey’s New Donk City. That part is independently documented. Ultimate was revealed on June 12, 2018, 49 days after that first tweet, with a redesigned Battlefield and the promise that everyone was here. SmashWiki says the booth props all turned up exactly as described, though no photo-documented outlet corroborates that half of it.

Keep the golden hammer, if nothing else. It comes not from Donkey Kong but from Wrecking Crew in 1985, swings at twice the speed of the ordinary Hammer, and can randomly malfunction into a Golden Squeaky Hammer that accomplishes nothing whatsoever. Of the 74 fighters in the base game, only the original eight could be selected when it booted. Everyone was here, in the sense that most of them were hidden.

The Loz18 Leak

A day before Nintendo showed anything, a GameFAQs poster typed out the changes to Ganondorf’s up smash. SmashWiki dates the post to June 11, 2018, though the thread itself now shows only a relative timestamp. In it, loz18 wrote that everyone was back including Young Link, Wolf, Pokemon Trainer, Pichu and the Ice Climbers, that Ganondorf’s up smash had become a sword attack instead of a kick, that Zelda’s model was based on A Link Between Worlds, and that Link was almost unchanged apart from using the Breath of the Wild bombs.

Ganondorf’s base moveset finally carries a sword in Ultimate, swung in an arc SmashWiki compares to Ike’s, exactly as described. Link’s bomb became the remote-detonated model. Zelda’s default appearance moved to A Link Between Worlds, and her old one was demoted to an alternate costume slot.

Then it gets complicated. An anonymous editor told SmashWiki’s talk page in October 2018 that loz18 had confessed to inventing all of it and getting lucky. A second editor half-agreed but refused to delete the entry, and when a third asked where the confession was documented, the entire reply was two words: It’s not. None of this appears on the page readers actually see.

Loz18 closed his account days after the following Direct and kept predicting characters elsewhere. Almost nothing else he said came true. One of the most precise leaks on this list may have come from somebody an anonymous editor says was only guessing.

The Castlevania Music Rename

For a few hours on the night of August 7, 2018, an unlisted video on Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. YouTube channel was called Bloody Tears / Monster Dance. It had been called Galaga Medley. A Reddit user named Hinata2000100 noticed, Game Informer confirmed the change independently, and GameXplain caught the new title on video.

Both tracks come from Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a Famicom Disk System game from August 1987. Nintendo had spent the preceding weeks posting soundtrack arrangements to that channel, and the Galaga music was there for a mundane reason: Pac-Man’s grab in Ultimate is Boss Galaga’s tractor beam, which makes Galaga music Smash music.

Game Informer had the story out overnight, roughly nine hours ahead. Nintendo Wire filed at 13:13 UTC with the Direct due at 14:00, which is forty-seven minutes of margin. What it spoiled was Simon Belmont, with Richter as his Echo Fighter, inside a broadcast that also produced Chrom, Dark Samus and King K. Rool.

The castle came with him. Dracula’s Castle arrived with breakable background candles and 34 tracks, and Alucard appeared as an Assist Trophy who attacks with a flurry of slashes and turns into a bat. Nintendo had the old title back up before the broadcast. The Belmonts were already out of the bag.

The Noatesty Leaks

Whoever ran that Reddit account said they had played the game, and the detail backs them up. On September 14, 2018 a poster calling themselves Noatesty made three posts naming Ken and Incineroar as Ultimate’s final two base-game newcomers and Piranha Plant as its first downloadable fighter, carrying moveset detail nobody outside Nintendo should have had. All three were confirmed together on November 1, forty-eight days after the posts.

Noatesty also gave the project’s internal codename as Cross2, and dataminers later found precisely that in the finished game’s files.

The same posts called the Flies and Hand Assist Trophy, lifted from Mario Paint’s 1992 Gnat Attack minigame, which swats for 25 percent damage. Incineroar’s entire kit is professional wrestling worn by a Pokemon whose flame belt is modelled on a championship belt, with a German Suplex for a back throw and a command grab, the Alolan Whip, that resolves three different ways depending on when a direction is pressed. Piranha Plant, a pipe hazard since 1985, arrived in a flowerpot and remains the only downloadable fighter excluded from both Fighters Passes.

SmashWiki declines to confirm one claim, about a day-one patch adding modes, and says plainly that it is unclear which modes were meant. Nothing else in the three posts missed.

All three Reddit posts now return a 403, and the account behind them was never identified. Three predictions, all three correct, and nothing about Smash from that account since.

The Ken Masters Screenshot

On September 21, 2018, at 8:28 in the evening Pacific time, a 4chan poster shared a screenshot of Ken Masters standing beside Pichu, Ivysaur and Pac-Man on Moray Towers in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Ken had not been announced. What made people believe it was a missing shadow: EventHubs spotted that he cast none under his left foot where he met the metal grating.

That should have been the flaw that exposed a fake. Instead a SmashBoards user called DJ3DS recreated the same shot inside Ultimate’s public demo build, substituting Ryu for Ken and Pikachu for Pichu, and found the identical lighting bug on the same metal surface. Siliconera reproduced it independently against demo footage running in Europe that week. ComicBook.com flagged Ken’s foot clipping through the floor as the sort of detail a forger would not bother to invent, and worried instead about Pichu’s portrait looking wrong, which turned out to match the E3 trailer exactly. Four outlets covered it inside a day. Ken was confirmed on November 1, forty-one days on.

He is, formally, an Echo Fighter of Ryu. Which is a promotion. When Street Fighter shipped in 1987 its playable cast had been trimmed to two by budget and scheduling, so Ken launched as a palette swap of Ryu with an all but identical moveset. Nintendo’s own site still files him at 60e.html, one notch behind Ryu at 60.

The Hero Codename Datamine

One word gave it away, and the word was brave. A private Discord group had decoded Ultimate’s internal character-parameters table on or around November 28, 2018, finding a hashed slot called fighter_kind_jack, and a second called fighter_kind_brave arrived with the version 1.1.0 update on December 5. They told nobody. The names reached the public on January 3, 2019, and within two days Nintendo Everything, Nintendo Life and KitGuru had all worked out that brave was the Japanese yuusha, the class name carried by the Dragon Quest protagonist.

They were right. Hero was revealed on June 11, 2019.

The jack half of the story is where people go wrong. Joker had already been announced at The Game Awards on December 6, 2018, a month before the codenames became public, and the group’s own account says they had privately guessed jack might be Raiden. No window exists in which anybody publicly knew jack meant Joker before Nintendo said so. Only brave counts.

Hero arrived as four Dragon Quest protagonists sharing one slot, with a down special that opens a genuine command menu of four randomly drawn spells, an MP gauge, and a one in eight chance of a critical hit on every smash attack. One of the spells, Kamikazee, costs a single MP point and kills him instantly. South Australia’s Smash Central banned him outright on August 15, 2019, then thought better of it. Randomness is difficult to legislate against.

The Banjo Tease

“Been a while since we saw Banjo in anything. Hope we’re in for a smashing good time.” That was the entire leak, as SmashWiki transcribes it; two outlets that covered it render the opening words differently, and the original is unreachable today. ResetEra administrator shinobi602 posted it on June 4, 2019, and Banjo and Kazooie were announced seven days later at Nintendo’s E3 Direct.

It worked because the phrase was already code. ResetEra staff had used a smashing good time before to flag incoming Smash news, including around the game’s first teaser in March 2018, and shinobi602 had a record behind him: EventHubs credited him with getting out ahead of God of War’s Norse setting and Ridley’s inclusion in Ultimate. The forum banned unverified rumours outright, which meant an administrator dropping a pun was doing the only thing available to him.

Getting the pair into Smash took less negotiation than anyone expected. Microsoft had bought Rare outright on September 24, 2002 for $375 million, seventeen years before any of this. Phil Spencer told Kotaku the deal had needed nothing at executive level, and Sakurai told Famitsu that Nintendo got the character quite easily.

The reveal trailer opens on a silhouette that turns out to be Duck Hunt’s dog in a costume, laughing at its own joke, before the real bear and bird knock it out of frame. Grant Kirkhope, who scored the 1998 original, wrote the music for it.

The Min Min Victory Screen

Nobody has ever proved that image was real. On June 8, 2020 a picture began circulating showing what looked like Min Min’s post-match victory screen in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, complete with the ARMS series icon and her name. Dexerto covered it under a headline ending in a question mark, observed that the font looked too thin against the rest of the cast’s victory screens, and passed on a reader’s note that the pose appeared mirrored, which meant either genuine access to the game’s models or an unusually capable editor.

Nothing has settled it since. What is certain is that fourteen days later, on June 22, Nintendo confirmed Min Min, and that she became playable a week after that. The image counted at all because it named her. Nintendo had already said, in a Direct Mini on March 26, that an ARMS character was coming; the entire question was which one, and this answered it.

The choice was made in-house. Sakurai had narrowed the choice to Min Min and the ninja Ninjara before the ARMS producer Kosuke Yabuki asked for Min Min, his own favourite, on the grounds that every fighter in ARMS is a protagonist. Her trailer opens with Spring Man, the face of the entire series, grabbing the Smash invitation and being flattened by Ribbon Girl. He appears in the finished game only as an Assist Trophy, summoned by other people.

The PracticalBrush12 Leaks

Ten minutes. SmashWiki records that as roughly the margin on the Byleth post, which named both versions of the character, all four Heroes’ Relics – the Sword of the Creator, Areadbhar, Aymr and Failnaught – and a Cuphead Mii Fighter costume, posted while Nintendo was queueing the video for January 16, 2020.

The same account did it again that October, about thirty minutes ahead of Steve and Alex on October 1, 2020, correctly naming Alex, Zombie and Enderman as alternate skins and describing a Final Smash built around a piston.

That October date matters more than it appears to. Steve and Alex were revealed by a short Sakurai-narrated trailer and a Nintendo of America tweet on the first; the Mr. Sakurai Presents broadcast most people remember came on the third and covered the moveset; the character became available on the thirteenth. Measured against the wrong one of those, thirty minutes turns into two days.

The account is otherwise unremarkable. Its one independent corroboration came in February 2021, when it listed sixteen games a couple of hours before a Nintendo Direct and every one of them appeared, including Mario Golf: Super Rush, which had not been announced anywhere. Then it went quiet. An account that got all of them right in advance has never been traced to anybody, and never asked to be.

The Sora Music Rights Leak

Nintendo had not yet admitted that October 5 meant anything. On July 30, 2021 an anonymous poster on 4chan wrote: Actual info here: I work for Disney Music. Nintendo called last week to request rights to several tracks from Kingdom Hearts to use in a digital event on October 5. Sora is the last Smash character.

Nintendo did not confirm that any October 5 presentation existed until September 23, fifty-five days later. Sora was revealed on the day itself and became playable on October 18.

Then Sakurai gave away something larger. Sora, he said, had won the 2015 Fighter Ballot outright – the worldwide poll that closed with around 1.8 million valid votes and whose announced winner had been Bayonetta, described at the time as the leading choice among negotiable and realisable characters. Nintendo had sat on the true result for six years, because publishing it would have sent fans after rights holders who had agreed to nothing.

The deal itself happened by accident. Sakurai met a Disney executive at an awards show, mentioned the idea, and was told they thought it would be good too. Fighters Pass Vol. 2 had been built to hold five characters and was extended to six to fit him in.

Disney then vanished from the artwork. Donald and Goofy were painted out of Sora’s Dive to the Heart background and replaced with a raft and a paopu fruit, and Mickey was removed from Riku’s. Sora is fighter 82, and there is no 83.