A Deep Dive Into Melee's Cut Stages

Today, let's do a deep dive into Melee's cut stages. We have 6 stages to talk about, with some containing remnants within the game itself and others recreated as concepts for your viewing pleasure. First off, we have Dummy. While it can be accessed in-game from the debug menu, it plays no music and is a completely empty stage aside from a single platform. Its blast zones are broken, with the characters' and camera's Y-axis values exceeding its bounds. Usually this causes the game to crash on load, however using a Gecko code we can force it to work. The platform is so small that if a character doesn't land on it in a precise spot, they will miss it and fall infinitely. It is well below the stage's camera placement. The purpose of this stage is unclear, although based on its name it's possible it could have been used as a placeholder for a debug purpose. It is fun to see a character falling infinitely like this though. Next we have test. It's a long, sprawling stage that plays the Corneria music. It has a background image of Cafe Verona in Palo Alto, California, which was commonly used for OpenGL testing at the time of Melee's development. It has a variety of slants, slopes, moving platforms, and varying ground types. It feels like a playground of sorts. As its name suggests, this stage was almost certainly used for testing and debug purposes. Interestingly though, there are no grabbable ledges, nor can you drop through any of the platforms. I love messing around with the slippery floor. Originally, Sheik was going to have her own target test stage apart from Zelda's. The remains of the stage are left on the disc. It is one gray platform with grabbable ledges and 3 targets. The blast zone on the left is oddly close to the stage. Playing on this in versus matches is quite funny. "Sannin desu!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" "Kya!" Now we're entering the fan recreation phase. These are stages that don't have any assets at all that we know of, but have been referenced in one way or another. The first one of these stages to discuss is based on a file in-game called "ice top". Originally, it would have been a second Ice Climber stage. A duplicate of this entry, "10-2", would have loaded after "10-1". Stage 1 in Adventure Mode, which of course is Icicle Mountain. Usually it crashes upon load, but through hacking it just loads Icicle Mountain without the music. However, a fan recreation exists in the modding community. Thanks to Fruit Sauce for this stage. In this concept, we can see several base platforms from Icicle Mountain and a stage model similar to Brawl Summit, with the various vegetables making an appearance in the background and a moving cloud platform. It's also fair to assume something even closer to Brawl Summit may have been intended for this stage slot melee, since its name was going to be Peak, Mountaintop, or Summit. In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Summit's filename is "ice_top," confirming this theory. Next is Akanea. This filename references the continent featured in the first and third Fire Emblem games, Arcania as it's called in the West. Originally, the stage would feature a castle, dragons, mages, and catapults with stones. Brawl's Castle Siege should come to mind. Modder Ankerman has redone a version of this stage in the Melee art style, inspired from the Smash 2 stage. This version uses a violet-blue and simpler background. And finally, we have Sprout Tower. Although no references to this stage exist in the game itself, as far as I'm aware, we have a direct reference to this stage idea from Sakurai on the Smaaburouken official website for Melee. This concept was created by modder Puffy for Beyond Melee, which features two gold Bellsprout statues, a wood design, and a shifting column. This takes inspiration from the location of the same name from Pokémon Gold and Silver. I absolutely adore this stage. Ultimately, it was replaced by Poké Floats due to time constraints. I hope you enjoyed this close look at the cut stages in Melee. To finish off this video though, I thought I'd include some Melee stage name trivia. Rainbow Cruise in English was a literal translation of the Japanese name for the stage. However, since this stage is a direct reference to Super Mario 64's level Rainbow Ride, it's likely the stage was "misnamed" by the localization team. This is further confirmed by the fact that the PAL version of both Melee and Brawl call the stage "Rainbow Ride," even though, eventually, Ultimate cements the name as "Rainbow Cruise." Poké Floats was another odd localization choice, as the Japanese name for this stage translates to "Pokémon Subspace." Aside from the English name, there is no indication whatsoever the Pokémon here are actual floats. As some of you probably already know, Smash 64's Kongo Jungle was a spelling error, which was corrected when the stage returned in Melee. A couple bonus bits of trivia here: initially Corneria and Venom's music tracks were swapped, with Sakurai feeling they fit better the way they were presented at the end of development. Stages were made overall smaller in Melee compared to Smash 64 so the characters were easier to see, as confirmed in another Snabura Ken post. If you're interested in more trivia like this, like how Pokémon Stadium was originally going to have Pokémon battling each other on it, check out my documentary Elevated: The Development Story of Super Smash Bros. Melee. There are a lot of good nuggets in there to discover. I also have a write-up detailing pretty much everything we know about Smash Bros. Melee's development on my website, as well as a blog post covering this video. I hope you check it out. Thank you so much for watching this video, and God bless.