The Outfoxies: The Original Super Smash Bros - Rerez

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Fighting games are one of the biggest genres ever in video games. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat II, you know the titles. But one of the best fighters out there in my mind is Super Smash Brothers and there is no game better than Super Smash Brothers Melee. It’s possibly one of my all time favorites. And I know a lot of you are thinking Super Smash Brothers is pretty unique. There aren't that many games out there that use the same kind of style as Super Smash Brothers Melee. It’s one of those really cool games in fact the whole Smash Brothers series is pretty neat. But did you know that Super Smash Brothers didn't actually originate its style of fighting? The first company to actually do that was Namco with a game called the Outfoxies released in 1994 in arcades.

The Outfoxies is a one-on-one arcade fighter that I consider to have been the direct inspiration for Super Smash Brothers having predated the game by several years. And the plot of the Outfoxies? Well it's this:

A mystery man named Mr. Acme contracted seven killers to assassinate seven world-famous art collectors. Oddly enough each killer was also hired to eliminate the other six killers. What is Mr. Acme's motive? What's in store for the survivor? Is it a large reward and the reputation of being the number one killer?

So it's kind of dumb but what fighting game of the early ‘90s had that much of a compelling story? Anyways what's important here is the gameplay and that's where this game gets tricky. While other fighters utilize combos or special move sets Outfoxies really doesn't. Its focus is on the stages you play and on the items and weapons you pick up. Much like Super Smash Brothers there are a variety of weapons that you can use to subdue your foe. From pistols to grenades, rocket launchers and machine guns you'll be able to find a limited but decent range of firepower. And also like Smash Brothers Outfoxies uses its level designs to its advantage. For instance one stage called the aquarium begins when you fight one of the characters named Betty Doe. At the start of the level she lights a fuse that eventually will destroy the fastenings of a whale mounted from the ceiling which will then fall through a couple of floors and get impaled on a trident. Pretty crazy right? But due to the aftershocks of that event water from an aquarium starts pouring into the stage filling up the building you're in and that water starts to get populated with very mean-looking sea life that will damage your ego. That's one of the coolest features of this game. The stages are awesome. Each one offering a different layout that changes the gameplay. With no two levels being the same it gives you a great sense of variety and the final stage reveals who Mr. Acme, your employer, really is and makes for an interesting switch up on the gameplay formula up until that point.

The characters that you play as each have some minor differences most notably Mr. Dweeb a chimpanzee wearing a tuxedo and top hat who kills people for bananas. He's so short that unlike any other player he doesn't have to crouch in fact he can't and that makes it very difficult to hit him. But while the game has lots of cool features there is a reason I believe that this title has sort of been forgotten over time. Sprite scaling. Now for those of you who don't know sprite scaling is when the game dynamically resizes and rotates pixels on a screen. If you've ever played Super Mario Kart all the tracks were created in a graphic mode called Mode 7 which was for the time an advanced way of altering an image on the screen without having to manually redraw everything. For a game like Super Mario Kart it works wonders but for the Outfoxies it's maddening. Every object, every character, in fact the whole stage dynamically zooms in and out and with the game's original resolution being so low you'll be in situations where you can barely see where your character is or what dangers are around them. When the level zooms out there is a dramatic loss of detail and due to the game's muted color scheme your character doesn't stick out against the background. The sprite scaling technique creates a bunch of interesting visuals for the game but it harms your ability to play it. When Smash Brothers hit the scene years later it was using a 3D engine better suited for zooming in and out. An option that Outfoxies simply didn't have back in 1994.

The Outfoxies never saw release outside of the arcades and I imagine this has to do with the complex nature of the sprite scaling. There was probably no way to replicate the gameplay smoothly on home consoles at the time. If not that it could have been the inclusion of Danny and Demi a single set of twin playable characters who are 11 years old. Although this game isn’t as graphically violent as say Mortal Kombat it does have a death animation for Danny and Demi that would have definitely caused some issues with certain North American politicians at the time. But really these are only guesses. The game isn't perfect and Namco simply might have felt that it would have been too much of a gamble to bring home. Whatever the reason is the Outfoxies is a really cool arcade game to play. It invented a fighting game style that has since been made popular by a completely different franchise.

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