Revealed in an online presentation today, the fighters will be the second Challenger Pack in the Fighters Pass Vol. 2 (following Arms' Min-Min), and will appear alongside a Minecraft-themed stage that can seemingly change each time it's loaded.
Steve's abilities seemingly include the use of in-game crafting to create swords, pickaxes, blocks and other familiar elements from Minecraft. It appears as though Alex, Zombie and Enderman will be echo fighters for Steve.Series creator Masahiro Sakurai explained that the process of creating Minecraft characters is more difficult than you'd expect, explaining that while the design, look, movement and sound were simple enough, but that the programming work is a "massive challenge". All the existing stages were also reworked to allow blocks to be placed in them.
Sakurai will present a second broadcast, 'Fighting with Steve & Alex' on October 3 at 7:30am Pacific / 10:30am Eastern / 3:30pm UK. That broadcast will include the characters' release date.
We're not claiming anything, but IGN's Brendan Graeber came up with his own take on how a Minecraft character could work in Smash last year, and looks to have predicted most of the moveset. We see you, Mr. Sakurai... Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
