That Rayman Super Smash Bros. ‘Leak’ Was Fake

If you were blissfully unaware of the latest commotion in the Super Smash Bros. community, someone posted a set of Smash Bros. Wii U assets of Rayman joining the game’s roster on 4chan yesterday. Such pictures included one of his character select portrait, the “Rayman joins the battle!” screen, as well as his avatar after being selected to fight in a Smash Battle. There was even a short video, shown from the opening screen straight through to character select.

Even though we should know better as to take everything posted on 4chan with a grain of salt (unless we can see actual gameplay, which was the case with Bloodborne), that didn’t stop others from rumor-mongering a clear fake. Unfortunately, for them and the Smash Bros. community, today the “leaker,” Arsty Omni, confirmed that he made it all up with an informative video showing the entire process of making the fake.

Starting from scratch to make the Rayman fake for Smash Bros. seems fairly complicated. So many of the small details had to be accounted for when drawing from in-game footage, including recreating the flame pattern that passes through the character select panel, cloning the cursor select hand, all the way down to making the “P1” button pulsate over time. Getting all of the intricate animations done properly was key to making a convincing fake, especially when shown in a short video on Youtube where everyone in the community can scrutinize it.

That said, my guess is that Arsty Omni may have pulled the trigger a bit too quickly. I’m convinced that letting the “story” lie for another day or two would have gathered him more credibility. On the other hand, the longer it stays unscrutinized, the longer in which people have to call out the fake. Hopefully, the Super Smash Bros. community at large can be appreciative of the effort made into deceiving them in a fun way. Just don’t go searching his Twitter account name in the Twitter search function any time soon.

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