Fan game
A fan game is a game created by the fans of a work that is explicitly based on said work. In terms of the Super Smash Bros. series, this results in low-budget, non-profit games that imitate the gameplay of the series, while simultaneously allowing fans to create and use characters and stages without having to hack an existing game. Fan games tend to be created in environments such as Flash, Game Maker, or Clickteam Fusion, and as a result, are almost exclusively sprite-based. Although the games often feature trademarked characters, settings, music, and other such aspects, their lower production values and presentation causes fan games to be considered legal under parody or fair use laws.
Projects that involve modification of the actual games in the series, such as Project+, Smash Remix, Brawl-, and HewDraw Remix, can be considered a type of fan game. Such projects, however, are often considered separate from typical fan games, due to their differing development; fan games are generally created from scratch, whereas mods involve modifying an existing game.
Notable fan games[edit]
Super Smash Flash 2[edit]
Super Smash Flash 2, commonly abbreviated as SSF2, is a fan game made in Adobe Flash, and developed by the Super Smash Flash 2 Team, led by Gregory "Cleod9" McLeod, and published by McLeodGaming. It is a sequel to the 2006 fan game Super Smash Flash, McLeod's first attempt at a Smash-like game made in Adobe Flash which featured gameplay cues closer to a traditional platform game. SSF2 follows much of the same mechanics as the official Smash games, but differentiates itself by having a 2D pixel art style and much looser content criteria for inclusion of characters who have never appeared in the official games, including playable characters from manga and anime series, such as Goku, Monkey D. Luffy, Naruto Uzumaki, and Ichigo Kurosaki. There are 48 playable characters in total, 15 of whom have never been playable in the official games and five — the aforementioned manga and anime characters and the Black Mage from Final Fantasy — of whom have not appeared in the official games in any capacity. It is available as both a web browser game and as a downloadable game for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. The first demo of SSF2, version 0.1a, was released on December 25, 2007. The most recent version, Beta 1.4.0, was released on May 9, 2025. The developers would go on to make another platform fighter, Fraymakers.
Super Smash Flash 2 is considered the most popular Smash fan game and fosters an active competitive scene, with several of the game's best players, such as LunarySSF2 and RiVer, eventually moving on to compete in official Smash titles.
Super Smash Bros. Crusade[edit]
Super Smash Bros. Crusade, often abbreviated as SSBC or Crusade, is a fan game originally released on January 2nd, 2010, with the latest update being v0.9.5 on August 8, 2024. Crusade was originally developed for Windows using the Game Maker 7/8 engine by Team Phalcon, consisting of Phantom7, Falcon8r, and Dr.MarioX. Crusade has a large number of fighters with 77 playable characters, 88 if including variants, with 38 of them appearing in the official Super Smash Bros. series, though several play very differently. Up to six players can play simultaneously. Like Super Smash Flash 2, the game is looser than official Smash games with its criteria for playable characters, including the likes of Goku, Vegeta, and Weegee.
Super Smash Land[edit]
Super Smash Land is a fan-made demake of Super Smash Bros. developed with GameMaker 7 by Dan Fornace, released on September 14, 2011. The game loosely adapts Smash's gameplay to a 2-button layout, one for jumping and one for attacking, while featuring graphics in the style of the original Game Boy. The game features 6 playable characters, including Mega Man — who hadn't appeared in an official game at the time — and Vaporeon, who has yet to appear in any official game, as well as 11 stages. Fornace would later go on to develop the platform fighter game Rivals of Aether, released in 2017; the Tower of Heaven stage from Smash Land was carried forward into Rivals, while Vaporeon's moveset would act as the basis for the Rivals character Orcane.
