Nintendo's hidden Smash Bros Melee message that no one will see

Nintendo's Treehouse translation team talks about why they leave Easter eggs in their work, including one message in Smash Bros Melee that's almost impossible to achieve.

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Nintendo's Treehouse division, the translation team responsible for many of its successful franchises making the jump to the states, has hidden a few Easter eggs deep in the recesses of its games. At least one of them, in Super Smash Bros. Melee, is so hidden they expect no one will ever find it on their own.

The team told Kotaku that it has been putting in little jokes or bits of dialogue in obscure spots for years. They might find a line funny, but figure no one will ever see it. One particularly hidden message in Melee is only seen after the player finishes a million matches. Even if you played extremely short matches, you'd have to do it for thousands of hours just to make the special message appear.

"It was largely unexciting," said Treehouse's Nate Bihldorff, who worked on the Mario & Luigi games. "I think it said, 'Go outside.'"

So what's the point of inserting text that they're fairly certain no one will find? Translator Tim O’Leary said they were essentially "writing those for each other." But another Treehouse veteran, Rich Amtower, has a different perspective.

"That's what a lot of my philosophy of the writing of it comes down to--you wanna reward people for having gone through the trouble," Amtower said. "It's really fun to think that someone might have done all that stuff and then get that awesome message out of nowhere."

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