Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee could have been a two-player fighting game, according to Pipeworks.
In the end, what we ended up getting was a four-player brawler. However, that technically wasn’t always the plan.
Atari, the game’s publisher, was interested in a four-player brawler. But Pipeworks was the developer, and the team “didn’t have any faith in that vision.” Because of that, the studio decided to making a two-player fighting title and went in that direction for several months.
At one point, Pipeworks was forced to quickly put together a four-player mode ahead of a showing to Atari – which is what the publisher wanted. After getting a mode playable with four characters, Pipeworks realized that this version “was immediately awesome.”
Pipeworks told us in a recent interview:
“So here’s an anecdote I’ve told many times over the years: Kirby Fong was the original Atari producer who conceived the game. And his vision was always a 4-player Godzilla brawler. But internally at Pipeworks (this is back in 2001) we didn’t have any faith in that vision. We wanted to make a 2-player fighting game. So we only worked on the game as a 2-player fighting game with a side-on camera. Our plan was to just make that feel excellent, and then demonstrate to Kirby that 4-player didn’t work. (That the camera couldn’t capture the characters properly, that the controls were too different, that it was too hard to balance, etc.)
So that was our plan for about 6-8 months. Until finally we hit the production milestone where we had to demonstrate the 4-player mode. We threw it together, because we knew we had to demonstrate to Kirby that it just wasn’t a good idea, and that 2-player fighting was going to be a better game.
And then… it was immediately awesome. All of the reasons that we expected 4-player to not work proved to be false. Kirby’s vision was correct all along. But it’s true that we fully polished the game as a 2-player fighting game, before accepting its identity as a 4-player brawler. I think it’s probably true that if we’d actually planned it internally as a brawler the combat would have been loose.”
After it originally released on the GameCube, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee is making a return on Nintendo Switch 2 next month.
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