Ever wanted to visit a stage from Super Smash Brothers in real life?
Well maybe, you can-
Provided you acknowledge the existence of stages that aren't Final Destination
(Game Theory Intro Theme)
Hello, internet! Welcome to Game Theory!
OHMIGOSH did you hear that Sakurai finally announced Ridley for Super Smash Brothers?
(rumbling) Wamp Wamp Wamp Wamp
Curse you obscure PS2 RPGs!!
Now despite Super Smash Brothers Melee being 15 years old,
Uhhhh Uhhh
Did you just feel the collective wave of people watching this video suddenly feel really old?
the community for the game is as strong as ever.
Earlier this month a bunch of animators collaborated to reimagine the game's iconic intro
and it's hilarious! And gamers have practically willed more depth out of the game
by looking at it through a closer and closer microscope- like velocity canceling,
which was just discovered for Melee last October. Look it up! It's wild!
I mean even the recent realization that you could hack your way into playing as Master Hand and Giga Bowser are incredible
and the game continues to make news with the world's top Smash 4 player recently revealing
his tiering list for Melee!
Better... late then never? I guess?
Anyway, at a time when most other fighting games get immediately over shadowed by their newer, flashier sequels,
unless your name is "Street Fighter V,"
Melee has held on.
It's a game that truly wave-dashed its way into our collective hearts!
But then, what more is there to say about this game after a decade and a half?
Well for all that time, one mystery has lingered on, quite literally, in the background and today I intend to solve it.
Three years ago while watching "Did You Know Gaming?" I heard this line:
(from video clip) "There are also some test stages left in the game's data.
One of the stages labeled "TEST" is long and textureless
Its background appears to be a photograph of the inside of a pub."
(MatPat) My mind was BLOWN!
Not because there were hidden stages in Melee; I mean, that in of itself was no big surprise.
Lots of test code never gets finished and remains hidden in game data.
But what really caught me off guard was the restaurant...
How weird is that?
To see a picture of a restaurant full of people in the background of a Nintendo mascot brawler game;
to see Bowser butt-stomping on Marth while people sip lattes in the background?
It's definitely unusual...
And for the last three years, I couldn't get it out of my mind.
Where was this place? What sort of restaurant was it?
My mind was filled with all these cool scenarios explaining why it was there in the game...
Maybe it was a favorite after-work hangout near HAL Laboratories that
the programmers would go to to gripe about having to code Pichu into the game.
Or maybe it was a bistro in the US,
outside of Nintendo of America's headquarters where Reggie's body was ready...
for lunch!
Probably the most important question that stuck in my mind was:
"Could I eat there?"
Was this a real place still in existence?
Could I really go get a cup of coffee at an in-game location from one of the most highly-regarded fighting games of all time?
(Inception sound effect)
How cool would that be!?
And with that...
(drum beat)
The quest was on.
(Inception sound effect)
Outside of the few sentences Young Town had on the matter in the Did You Know Video,
the only other clues I had to go off of were in the Smash Brothers Melee Wiki,
Which explained that it was a coffee shop in Palo Alto, California.
I got excited because, as a California resident, it meant that I was close,
but then on the other hand there were no references,
so it could just be as meaningless as the time
Wikipedia reported that Miley Cyrus had died.
The only other thing it mentioned was that the coffee
shop was a common test image used for Open GL 3D object texture mapping,
Which begs the question, (super smash brothers baseball bat noise) What the h*** does all that mean?
Well, back in the 80's, it was hard to develop software
that could work across all the different types of graphics hardware.
There was no standard, and so software developers
were forced to custom fit their product for each new system they were working on.
Let's see, this was the 80's so what would be a
good comparison to draw.
Imagine having a VHS tape of the David Bowie,
Jim Henson childhood ruining classic, Labyrinth.
Say you want to relive all the eyeliner, muppet-tastic glory,
but each time you go to a friend's house
you needed a different version of the same VHS tape
simply because they had a different VCR
or video cassette recorder for those of you
who are so young you're still trying to figure out what a
VHS tape is from the last sentence.
As you can imagine, that's gonna be frustrating.
The movie should work on every VCR.
Having a different version for each one would be
expensive, inefficient, and just a waste of time.
Well that was the situation for software developers back then
and Open GL or Open Graphics Library
was created to solve that.
A cross-platform programing interface that would work across different code languages
and allow you to render 2D and 3D vector graphics,
and now a days it's used in everything from Virtual Reality to, well of course, video games,
and our Super Smash Brothers Restaurant Image
was apparently one that would appear in Open GL textbooks.
Used for exercises where 2D images would have to be mapped onto 3D surfaces
to make them appear more realistic.
Basically, it was a part of a homework assignment to teach people texture mapping.
A word that gets tossed around a lot in the gaming scene,
but you may not actually have known what it meant
until now.
And so, I looked into these online manuals,
and sure enough, there was our Smash Brothers Restaurant,
mapped onto a martini glass.
So much for it being a Nintendo specific image.
My romantic visions of stalking Reggie
during a luncheon from a corner booth in the pub
fizzled away.
That said, I was too far to turn back now.
At this point, I was determined to find the Super Smash Brothers stage in real life,
but my next step didn't lie with the Gamecube,
but rather the history of texture mapping itself.
After doing a bunch of Google searching,
I was eventually able to find another useful mention of
Open GL at a coffee shop on Tomb RaiderForums.com
where a group of people from 2006 were just as baffled
as I was after finding our little test stage image
in the texture files for Tomb Raider: Legend.
Tomb Raider and Smash Brothers?
Our little coffee shop had been making the rounds,
but what role did it have in this game?
After digging through footage,
basically playing Where's Waldo with an image of a 90's coffee shop,
I found it as a reflection
in the sunglasses Laura wears while
equipped with her special cat suit.
Yeeeaah. Definitely easy to miss,
since you might be distracted by other features of this particular outfit.
(punching noises)
But if you're able to make eye contact long enough,
sure as shootin, it's there.
Personally I think it's pretty funny
her glasses just reflecting a random cafe
while she's out there trolling trough tombs across the world.
Anyway, a German user on the forum
who went simply by Cochrane had gotten just
about as far as I did with Open GL Programming guide,
but then sometime later updated his post with a link
to a personal website of a man named Paul Debevec,
Chief Visual Officer at the USC Institute of Creative Technology
and research professor in the USC computer science department.
It's clearly an old site,
I mean look at that sweet geo-cites layout,
but don't let the lack of CSS formatting fool you,
it's actually a really cool site that chronicles the history of reflection mapping,
a.k.a using a photo as a texture on a 3D model to simulate reflections on it's surface.
It starts with the first ever example of reflection mapping
from 1976, the Utah Teapot.
Notice the windows and doors on the pot?
Yeeaah that's where it all started.
going so far as to cover the reflections on the T-1000
from Terminator 2,
before finally concluding with, you guessed it,
our Smash Brothers Photograph
only this time, with references.
(Inception noises)
Apparently the photo is from a paper
dating back to 1993
taken by a man named Paul Haeberli.
We actually reached out to Paul Debevec,
who knew the photographer,
and he confirmed everything we found out about the image.
He clarified that it originally was released to the public
as part of a "very influential set of Silicon Graphics hardware/software demos,
and could be seen mapped onto a
shiny bust of Beethoven and the famous Utah Teapot.
Showing the whole graphics community
of the early 1990's real-time reflection mapping
which was amazingly cool."
He also explained why such an influential picture
in the world of texture mapping would be a weird image of a cafe.
The layout of the picture meant it could
easily be mirrored, flipped over it's axis, and then stitched together
to create a believable spherical image
for mapping purposes.
But most importantly of all, what Paul and his site
were able to confirm for us, was the name of the restaurant itself,
The Caffe Verona
and I know what you're thinking,
no that is not a typo, that is legitimately how they spelled their name.
It is weird.
Which was indeed in Palo Alto, California,
so with an address in hand, the next phase of the journey began.
We'd solved the mystery of the photograph,
and now all that was left was to make the holy pilgrimage
and literally walk into and interact with
not just a small piece of Super Smash Brothers history
but a critical location for all of 3D graphics as we know them.
Except, after all that work,
it was impossible.
A search on Yelp revealed that the Caffe Verona
had closed it's doors not long after Melee was released,
on August 31st, 2003.
NOOOOOO!
after all that effort, after all that time thinking about it,
I needed closure, so I kept looking and I found an article
titled The travesty of Caffe Verona.
Apparently, this historic cafe,
appearing in video games
and 3D texture maps for years
is kind of a shady place.
Immigration and naturalization services had raided the kitchen for employing undocumented kids
from Europe, and despite earning the title of
"Best Solo Dining Experience in Palo Alto,"
it was accused of serving day old food
that had been heated using a microwave!
(DUM DUM DUMMMM)
Drama Aleert!
In retrospect though, not all that shocking
considering they couldn't even spell their name right.
So is that it? Is that the end of the story?
Can you never visit Melee's Test Stage?
Well, not the cafe, no, it's long gone,
but the location is still operational.
After remaining closed for 6 years,
the space was turned into Reposado,
an upscale Mexican restaurant that's been extremely well reviewed
and is still open!
Chimichangas anyone?
In short, all the answers in hand,
I had to make peace with the fact
that time had moved on,
and that the cup of coffee that would make me a part of Smash History
would never happen, but when you actually
stop to think, it's pretty wild
to think that one picture, in the background
of a test level that most people
have never seen in a game that's over 15 years old,
would lead us from an office at Nintendo Japan
to some key players at the dawn of realistic 3D graphics
to a classic local coffee shop
busted for illegal child labor in California
to a killer plate of Cochinata Pibel.
The world is an incredible place.
Hidden around us at any given moment
are a million little things just like this,
filled with character, and flavor, and windows into scenes you never even knew existed,
so is all this important on it's own?
Not really. The world hasn't changed now because
we know where this picture came from,
but it's thinking like this that makes sure we never stop learning
everything we can from the world around us,
and that's a pretty valuable lesson coming from a decade's old picture ...
But Hey! That's Just a THEORY!
A Game Theory!
Thanks for Watching!
And hey! If you liked that theory,
check out my other Super Smash Brothers theory
on the secret lore of the franchise
by clicking right here.
This type of annotation works on mobile too,
so just click it to try it out.
It's really cool.
Or in case you missed it, check out my Life is Strange Theory,
which is also touchy-feely in it's own special way
talking all about the psychology of ... you.
It's one I'm really proud of, and even if you're not a big fan of Life is Strange,
I think you'll get something out of it.
Now if you'll excuse me, that whole Chimichonga idea sounded really good,
so I'm gonna go eat things, maybe not in Palo Alto, California
because that's a bit of a ways away, but you know,
maybe the taco stand down the street.
See you next week! Reposado ...
(beep) Reposado ... I can't do it in a sexy voice!
I cannot make this sound sexy ... damn it
(beep) One more time Reposado ...
Nope still not ...