Eric Ravenscraft
Every once in a while, Nintendo holds a Nintendo Direct event to announce what’s coming up for the company. Sometimes these events don’t have a lot of really big news. Other times, they drop a teaser for a new Super Smash Bros. game for the Switch. This time, it’s the latter.
At Nintendo’s most recent Direct event, the company announced a slew of upcoming games for the Switch. Most of them are ports of other, popular games including South Park: The Fractured But Whole (coming April 24th), Hyrule Warriors (coming May 18th), Okami HD (coming Summer 2018), and Undertale (coming “eventually”). The most baffling, yet welcome surprise is that the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy will arrive July 10th. With Sonic already in the house of Mario, it seems Nintendo has finally conquered all of its childhood rivals.
The real news, though, is the sudden announcement of a new Smash Bros. game. After announcing a slew of new content for Splatoon 2, Nintendo started playing another teaser that also opened with the Splatoon kids sliding and shooting across the screen. It looked like it was going to be another Splatoon announcement until, slowly, the sky darkens and a fiery logo appears behind the kids. Mario and a Breath of the Wild-style Link lurk in the shadows, backs to the flames. It’s Super Smash Bros. and it’s coming to the Switch in 2018.
It’s not totally clear just yet whether this is an entirely new game or an update and content pack for the version that came out on the Wii U. Nintendo pulled a similar strategy for Mario Kart 8, which worked extremely well since comparatively few households bought a Wii U. Meanwhile, the Switch sold more units in a year than the Wii U did over its entire life cycle. Whether the new game is brand new or just new to most of us, the ability to play Smash no matter where you are is going to be huge.
Source: Nintendo Direct
