Three years ago, a group of enterprising Nintendo fans launched Project M, a mod for the 2008 Nintendo Wii game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Even though Super Smash Bros. Brawl has received universal acclaim and commercially successful worldwide, and sold 874,000 - 1.4 million copies from launch day to its first week, the group’s mission statement was: Brawl was a terribly flawed game that needed fixing, and through mods they could mend it.

That mission has been accomplished. The twelve versions of Project M that the team released transforms Brawl into a game worthy of the serious tournament play its predecessor Melee plays. Nintendo released Super Smash Bros: Melee on the Nintendo GameCube in 2001. The four-player fighting game with an all-star cast of Nintendo characters quickly developed a hardcore competitive fan following. But Nintendo thought the game was “too difficult” and changed things up for the Wii version of the series, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This might have made things easier for newbies, but it alienated hardcore players.

“Brawl was made to appeal to newcomers somewhat at the expense of some of the series’ most dedicated fans,” says Project M senior developer Corey Archer.

But the newer game did have its appeal, since it expanded the character roster from 26 to 97, adding more fan favorite competitors like Pit from Kid Icarus, Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Project M’s goal was to overhaul the move sets of every one of those characters and bring back characters that were not carried over from the GameCube.

Any Wii or Wii U owner with a copy of Brawl can install Project M simply by downloading the mod to an SD Card and inserting it into their console, no hardware hacks or coding required. The group says about 100,000 users have downloaded and installed previous versions of the mod.

“Brawl has a memory exploit in its Stage Builder that allows us to dump an executable on the stack and run it,” says Archer. “We use this exploit to load a code handler, which loads our codebase and assembly hooks into memory when booting the game.”

From there, Project M can make Brawl use assets it created — custom stages, new character models, animations, anything. More than 100 contributors from around the world have worked on Project M over the years, with a select group of senior members forming a leadership council that has made decisions about where to take the mod.

Project M’s makers say they want their version of the game to be accessible to newcomers, but Brawl will only have lasting appeal if it offers players an environment where they can continuously improve, constantly pushing each other to new levels of competition. This requires that every playable character in the game is more balanced against one another. Project M says accomplishing that in a game with as many characters as Super Smash Bros. is a nightmare.

Nintendo itself didn’t even come close; Archer says that in high-level Melee play, the adorable Pokemon character Jigglypuff and Star Fox‘s Fox McCloud were dominant. In Brawl, it was Meta Knight from the Kirby series who could ruin any other character. Much of the past four years has been spent addressing this issue, and Project M believes it’s finally put everyone on something of an even playing field.

As big Nintendo fans, the Project M team hasn’t just used their access to the Brawl code to tweak the gameplay mechanics. They’ve had some fun, too. Sonic the Hedgehog’s homing attack now includes classic animations from the Sonic Adventure series as an homage for fans. Diddy Kong has been given a taunt move in which he pulls out juggling balls, a reference to the Donkey Kong Country games.

Archer says that after 3.0 there will likely be only one more major release with a few more tweaks before his team considers the project finished for good. It might add even more Nintendo characters to the mix, he says. “If we come up with any good ideas for the remaining unused character slots we will probably be filling at least a few of those up as well.” However, they've released 4 more versions!!!

On December 1, 2015, after the release of version 3.6, the PMDT announced it would cease further development of Project M, effective immediately, in favor of beginning development on an original project. The development team denied allegations that legal threats from Nintendo were the cause of the project's termination. According to the team's attorney and business consultant, Ryan Morrison, the decision was not made as a result of a cease-and-desist notice or legal action by Nintendo. One member of the development team stated that the mod's cancellation was to prevent future legal issues, and the team decided to call the whole thing quit. But, who knows? Maybe they can come back together someday and work on figuring out how to crack Nintendo’s Smash Bros. for the Wii U.

Overall, you should check out this hack...and look up tutorials on how to install it. Also, try to go hackless (in terms of your Wii or Wii U console) because it's the easiest and fastest option, and it'll be worth it!

Rating: 4.5 / 5