Ice Climber (universe)

The Ice Climber universe (アイスクライマー, Ice Climber) refers to the Smash Bros. series' collection of characters, stages, and properties that hail from Nintendo's old, classic video game series, Ice Climber, released in 1984 for the arcade cabinets and, in 1985, made a port for NES. The game was one of several classic NES games that HAL Laboratory was considering bringing back to modern attention by including it in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and it won out over the other games of the Famicom/NES era to include the Ice Climbers as playable characters.

Interestingly, it has made two crossovers with the Balloon Fight universe: the alternate music for Icicle Mountain, basically called "Balloon Fight," and the fish that is a regular antagonist when the iceberg drops into the water in The Summit.

Franchise description[]

On December 17th, 1984, Nintendo released Vs. Ice Climber, a portion of a series of arcade cabinets, titled Nintendo Vs. Series.

Ice climber (Game) — A screenshot of the original ice climber game.

One year later, in 1985, the game Ice Climber was released in the U.S. and it was among the groups of video games released prior to the release of the original Super Mario Bros. later that year. In that sense, it would not have been considered a huge success, as video games had not entered the mainstream at the time. It was the first game programmed by prominent programmer, Kazuaki Morita, and he would later consider this game his "warm-up" on the NES before his work as a main programmer on the following game, "Super Mario Bros." which revolutionized the industry. Morita later had central programming roles in other Mario games, as well as games in The Legend of Zelda series and Star Fox 64 as well. Ice Climber, in the meantime, had been ported to other related platforms, such as the Famicom Disk System, with an altered and more obscure expansion, titled Vs. Ice Climber, released in arcades in the year before its first traditional release. During the more recent timeline, the game had been ported to several modern platforms, such as the e-Reader for Game Boy Advance (as well as a Classic NES series entry), as a collectible NES game in the 2002 GameCube game Animal Crossing, and as an entry in the list of games available for the Wii Virtual Console.

In Ice Climber, the player controls one of two children in eskimo parkas and wielding huge mallets (the game can be played solo with the blue mountaineer, Popo, seen only on-screen as the default first player, or cooperatively, where the other pink mountaineer, Nana, is controlled by the second player simultaneously), and the challenge is to scale vertical stages, titled mountains, to recover the Ice Climbers' stolen vegetables from a giant condor that flies around at the top of each mountain. Each stage consists of eight lower floors featuring barriers and blocks of breakable ice arranged to make jumping up and climbing each stage tricky. During this, the Ice Climbers must contend with a few varieties of antagonists native to this mountain: the relatively harmless Topi, which pushes ice into gaps to impede the player's progress; the more harmful bird, the Nitpicker, which flies around and can damage the player; and the pink-shorts-wearing, sunglass-sporting, upright-walking Polar bear, which pounds the ice to force the screen to move upward, and if an Ice Climber is too far down at the bottom, a life will potentially be lost. After eight floors, the Ice Climbers reach the second half of the stage, the "bonus" stage, where without enemies to be aware of, and the players must navigate a tricky platforming obstacle-course, collecting vegetables for bonus points, and when the duo reach the mountain's peak, the condor flies above the skies. To complete the stage, jump up with pinpoint precision to grab the condor's talons and end the stage with a huge bonus award.

Ice Climber remained a gem and relic from gaming history that would continue to stand itself out from the other Famicom/NES games and live up in the current timeline, like other games, such as Kid Icarus and Balloon Fight. Reflecting this, the Ice Climber series have garnered solid reviews from critics. When HAL Laboratory was designing Super Smash Bros. Melee, they decided that one of these games would be introduced in the game as a playable franchise. The game selected was Ice Climber, and the result was the titular pair of Ice Climbers, Popo and Nana, as a single playable fighter, the stage, "Infinite Glacier/Icicle Mountain," as a playable stage, referencing the mountains in Ice Climber, and Topis and Polar bears as common enemies. In addition, graphics and layout from the original series were reused in the Ice Climbers' Target Test stage to serve as a heavy nostalgia trip. Melee introduced the modern generation of gamers to Ice Climber and renewed the latter game's appreciation by the community.

List of Games in the Ice Climber franchise[]

VS. Ice Climber (1984/Arcade)
Ice Climber (1985/NES)

In Super Smash Bros. Melee[]

Ice Climber is a franchise first introduced in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and it features a standard universe's worth of content from the franchise, offering the Ice Climber franchise a major representation in Melee.

Character[]

Ice Climbers: A pair of young, short and chibi-proportioned children clad in blue and pink eskimo-proportioned parkas, the Ice Climbers (respectively, Popo and Nana) live and sustain themselves on a variety of vegetables. When a giant condor steals the vegetables for itself and flees up to the peaks of various mountains, the pair grab huge, wooden mallets and hike up each mountain, smashing blocks of ice in their routes and swatting Topis, Nitpickers, and Polar Bears before retrieving their stolen veggies and confronting the condor at the top. The Ice Climbers are the most unique fighters in Melee, in that it is a pair of duplications of the same fighter, mimicking each other's moves a fraction of a second apart, and the player controls the "leading" Ice Climber while the second is a CPU ally. Considered gimmicky at first glances, over time, professional players have learned to take advantage of this setup with various innovations, such as desynching, transforming the Ice Climbers into a combatant in the top-tier.

Stage[]

Melee features one stage based on the Ice Climber game. A second one was apparently planned, however; hidden in the debug menu is the name of a stage called "IceTop," but it was apparently never designed because selecting it will only transport to the traditional stage detailed below without music:

Infinite Glacier: Icicle Mountain: Representing the vertical, platformed mountains that Popo and Nana regularly scale, this is perhaps the game's most unorthodox stage; it is an infinitely scrolling vertical stage where all sorts of platforms are laid out in almost random configuration, and one must pay attention both to the battling and retaining oneself on platforms that are not about to disappear off the bottom into the abyss. It is a combination of this and the fact that the KO boundaries on either side of the stage are rather close to each other, causing potentially random KOs, that several players consider this their least favorite stage and it is often banned in tournaments. In Adventure Mode, this stage features several Topis and Polar Bears as common enemies, and the Mario-series item, Freezie, makes several appearances with the Topis as well.

Common Enemies[]

Melee features some easily KO'ed obstacle opponents hailing from the Ice Climber universe. This is potentially considered unusual because the game's other common enemies only belong to "big" franchises, such as Mario and Zelda.

Topi: In the U.S. versions of both Melee and the original Ice Climber, the Topi is a small, fluffy creature said to resemble a Yeti. In the Japanese versions of these games, however, the Topi is a blue seal. The reason for this change is that Nintendo was wary of potential American accusations of depicting animal cruelty in Ice Climber, in which the Ice Climbers would hammer the Seal Topis with their mallets, so they changed the Topi into a more fictional creature. In the original Ice Climber, the Yeti Topi or the Seal Topi is relatively harmless and serves only to impede progress by placing blocks of ice over the openings in stages the Ice Climbers would jump through, and in Melee they walk and slide around damaging whoever they bump into.
Polar Bear: This animal is a bipedal polar pear wearing pink shorts and sunglasses. In Ice Climber, it is an uncommon enemy, which is potentially deadly because it pounds the ice to force the screen to move upward, and if the Ice Climbers are too far down at the bottom, they will lose a life. As common Melee enemies, they operate like in Ice Climber. The Polar Bears also function like Topis, in that they walk around without much performances, but characters bumping into them receive devastating damage and knockback, and Polar Bears take more hits before they are KO'ed.

Music[]

25: Icicle Mountain: A synthesized medley of the two primary tunes in the NES game, Ice Climber, with the first part being the "bonus stage music" and the second part being the "normal stage music." It is heard in the stage, "Infinite Glacier: Icicle Mountain," as its primary track.
50: Ice Climbers' Victory: The victory fanfare of Ice Climbers is an orchestration of the victory music that occurs in the original Ice Climber when an Ice Climber reaches the top of a stage and manages to jump up and grab onto the talons of the Condor.

Full Trophy List[]

#	Name	First Game / Move	Description
37	Ice Climbers	Ice Climber 10/85	That's Popo in the blue and Nana in the pink. These two stars of the game Ice Climber have scaled many an icy summit in their mountaineering careers. Back in their glory days, they chased eggplants, cucumbers, and other vegetables that inexplicably fell from frosty summits where a condor reigned supreme. They're rarely seen apart.
38	Ice Climbers [Smash]	B: Ice Shot Smash B: Squall Hammer	This unique twosome fights together as a team. Your score will not be affected if the CPU-controlled character is KO'd, but a lone Ice Climber won't be able to use teamwork moves, which will make for a tough and frantic solo fight. The Ice Shot fires mini-glaciers out of their hammers, while Squall Hammer is at its strongest when Nana and Popo combine their strength.
39	Ice Climbers [Smash]	Up & B: Belay Down & B: Blizzard	The colors of the Ice Climbers' parkas denotes who's in the lead: Nana's in pink or orange, while Popo's in green or blue. Their hairstyles are also slightly different. Belay allows them to cover great distances, but doesn't give foes the chance to target their landing. Blizzard is best used in close quarters; in the fray, Nana and Popo will sometimes freeze opponents. The colors of the Ice Climbers' parkas denotes who's in the lead: Nana's in red or orange, while Popo's in green or purple. Their hairstyles are also slightly different. Belay allows them to cover great distances, but doesn't give foes the chance to target their landing. Blizzard is best used in close quarters; in the fray, Nana and Popo will sometimes freeze opponents.
199	Topi	Ice Climber 10/85	Topis debuted in the game Ice Climber, shuttling ice with which to repair cracks in the floors. They were kept really busy, as Nana and Popo constantly cracked floors with single strikes of their ice hammers. Despite the monotony of their chilly work, these creatures never slacked off for an instant.
200	Polar Bear	Ice Climber 10/85	This bizarre beast appears whenever the Ice Climbers take five during their ascents. Each leap the upright bear makes causes an earthquake and makes the mountain scroll upward. If the climbers fall off the bottom of the screen, they'll drop into a bottomless chasm. For reasons unknown, it sports pink shorts and sunglasses.

Notes[]

In the Japanese version, the Topi trophy uses its appearance from the Japanese version of Ice Climber: a blue seal. This was altered in the American and European versions due to the issue of seal clubbing, which is not as significant in Japan.

In Super Smash Bros. Brawl[]

The Ice Climbers make their reappearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with the universe's representation being more prominent than it was in Melee, coming from their designs' huge graphical improvements, the vegetables from Ice Climber returning to Brawl, and a stage not as universally disliked as Icicle Mountain. Additionally, the duo have also received a stage exclusive to the game's adventure mode, The Subspace Emissary, entitled "The Glacial Peak," with huge references to the Ice Climber series.