This project is a gender breakdown of Super Smash Bros. playable characters over time. I will explore all five games in the Super Smash Bros series and will categorize all playable characters by gender, including characters purchasable through DLC, to determine if the gender ratios have changed over time.
Introduction
November 30, -0001
Welcome to my computational media project Super Smash Bros: Playable Character Gender Analysis. Here I will be exploring how Nintendo has diversified (or failed to diversify) the playable characters’ genders in the Super Smash Bros series over time. The Super Smash Bros (SSB) video game series was created by Masahiro…
Read moreSuper Smash Bros. (1999)
January 21, 1999
The first-ever SSB game was Super Smash Bros. (1999), a game released on the Nintendo 64 with only 12 playable characters. These characters, and the series they originated from became the core of the SSB series. These franchises included The Legend of Zelda, Mario, Star Fox, Yoshi, Kirby, Donkey Kong,…
Read moreSuper Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
November 21, 2001
The second version of Smash was Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001), a dramatically more complex game released on the GameCube with 26 playable characters. This game had a much larger development team and budget than the original game, selling more than 7 million copies. This makes SSB Melee the best-selling…
Read moreSuper Smash Bros. Brawl (2008)
January 31, 2008
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008) was the third installation of the SSB series and made a splash on the Wii with 39 playable characters and an all-new multiplayer adventure mode. This was the first game in the series to support online play and to offer players the ability to build…
Read moreSuper Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U (2014)
September 13, 2014
The first mobile version of SSB was introduced through Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U (2014). While this game lacked some of the complexity of earlier versions, it was touted for it’s staggering 51 playable characters, or 58 with purchasable DLC. This was the first SSB game…
Read moreSuper Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018)
December 7, 2018
Game reviewers across the internet agree that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018) is the most impressive edition of the SSB series yet. This game was released on Nintendo’s latest console, the Nintendo Switch, with the promise of every character and stage from the entire series available to play. It was…
Read moreData Visualization and Conclusion
October 13, 2019
Well, the results are in! I created a Google Sheets document to make the following data more transparent. The sheet shows how I marked each character within each of the four gender categories and which games in the SSB series each character appears in. This document can be viewed by…
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