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I was over at a friend’s house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo’s extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It’s branded fun.

Apples and Toadstools

Now, Nintendo is a company that is about fun. They have no choice, you might say, but to tie fun into their branding strategy. What about the rest of us? We make productivity applications, or sandwiches, or else we’re the IRS.

Fair enough. But, take a look at three really successful brands, and some of their defining choices over the last few years:

Apple, creator of PC hardware and software, operates with a branding cornerstone of consumer-grade creative applications - why? Because making music is fun. Making videos is fun. Even the most functional components of Mac OS are designed with a mantra of aesthetic giddiness that alarmingly seems to supersede all usability guidelines.

Apple’s OSX Leopard Dock results as part of a larger branding strategy to focus on the "fun" factor, often at the expense of the Apple HIG.

And of course, branded fun doesn’t end with the end user:

The Unbelievably Popular social web application Facebook brought the fun to the developer-side last year, combining, in a brilliant stroke of competitive geeksploitation, the fun of creative computer hacking with gambling and all pursuant promises of riches, by way of its Developer Challenge, which offered web application developers the chance at a $5000 prize for the best "an application…that integrates a Facebook feature with your favorite mobile components."

The Coolest Small Company in America, Zingerman’s Deli, famously keeps the fun alive on the employee-side, with their fun and funny, yet highly branded internal documentation.

A cartoon from "A Guide to Effective Telephone Service at Zingerman’s".

More is More

For my money, though, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is our master-class in the art of making a branded user experience fun. The thing that’s so impressive about this effort is not only the above laundry list of good design choices, but the absolute volume of branding packed into every conceivable unit of measure of the game-playing experience.

From the obvious use of a stable of 35 playable characters and the 41 stages representing a wide swatch of Nintendo’s history, to the fresh arrangements of classic Nintendo songs, to the 4 separate play-control styles (including the Classic controller!), every element of SSBB is branded backwards and forwards to evoke the sentiment that the history of video game fun is absolutely coextensive with the history of the Nintendo brand.

Nintendo capitalizes on its deep history, including characters and stages going as far back as its pre-NES handheld games. Check out this Nintendo Electronic Games Catalog from 1983.

And the only reason it’s not completely obnoxious - because what we’re really talking about here is a giant interactive commercial - is because it really is so fun.

The critics seem to agree. Please note also that Nintendo Power (another arm of the Nintendo advertising machine) awarded Brawl a perfect score in the March 2008 issue, calling it "one of the very best games that Nintendo has ever produced." From a corporate perspective, they couldn’t be more right. SSBB is Nintendo’s coup de grâce, if not the defining moment in the history of game-as-branding-strategy.

In classic video game economics, SSBB players earn coins by completing tasks. Presumably you can use these coins to purchase more Nintendo products.