Masahiro Sakurai needed permission from all IP owners involved in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the ability to choose any song for certain stages
Back in August, the version 8.1.0 patch dropped for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate without much warning. Although there weren't any balance adjustments made to the game, this ended up being a significant update.
This patch made minor adjustments to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's online experience, added a new stage known as "Small Battlefield," and made it possible to select from over 1,000 song tracks while playing on Battlefield, Big Battlefield, Small Battlefield, or Final Destination.
"As such, we've made it so that [Small Battlefield] won't be inferior to the Battlefield and Final Destination options," said Masahiro Sakurai during his 611th column for the Famitsu Column. "You can pick from the game's entire music library for Small Battlefield. That's over 1,000 different songs."
While this sounds like it'd be easy to implement, there was apparently a lot of work to do outside of the game for this to be possible. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a crossover between many different gaming worlds and intellectual properties.
As such, everything in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn't actually owned by Nintendo. Plenty of third parties like Capcom, Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, and many other popular gaming companies have some representation in Smash.
To add the option to select from over the 1,000 unique songs for Final Destination, Battlefield, Big Battlefield, and Small Battlefield, Masahiro Sakurai and the development team had to seek out permission from all the IP owners.
"Getting permission from all the rights holders for something like this is a very big undertaking," noted Sakurai. "But somehow we managed to make it a reality."
Pretty nifty for a patch that was essentially shadow dropped and didn't make any new characters readily available to download and play.
A special thanks goes out to Nicholas 'MajinTenshinhan' Taylor for his translations that were used in this article.
