Masahiro Sakurai built the best-selling fighting game franchise in history partly because he found fighting games too inaccessible. This episode traces his journey from HAL Laboratory in 1996, when he pitched both a stealth game and a chaotic four-player brawler, to the prototype called Dragon King that Satoru Iwata programmed on weekends while managing other projects. We explain how Sakurai replaced health bars with damage percentages so every hit changes the physics, and how a secret demo featuring Mario, Donkey Kong, Samus and Fox reversed Shigeru Miyamoto's initial rejection.

From there we cover Iwata's marketing stroke of adding the word Brothers to the title, the 13-month Melee crunch with a single day off and hand-drawn storyboards, the wavedashing quirk that spawned a competitive scene still active decades later, and Sakurai's 2003  ...