David V. Kimball, a marketing director and content creator who has previously made videos about Super Smash Bros. Melee, stumbled across the design documents — drawn by Masahiro Sakurai — by using the Wayback Machine on HAL Laboratory's website.
Sharing the panels on Twitter, Kimball came across these while researching for his next video — so it wasn't like he was just browsing the HAL website in search of this artwork. It's a pretty cool find!
The storyboards showcase the opening movie of the N64 platform fighter, which to anyone who's played the original game, is pretty darn iconic. There are instantly recognisable panels, such as Mario sitting on the desk to all the fighters jumping onto the screen at once.
Using Google translate, the HAL Labs website states:
We'll post a selection of the panels below, but we highly recommend checking out the website via the Wayback Machine yourself. Note, that while the thumbnails appear to be broken, most of the links will actually lead to the storybook panels. However, there were a few we (and Kimball, who says he couldn't "recover all of it") couldn't open at the time of writing this.
As part of his channel, Sakurai shared some footage of Dragon King, the prototype for Super Smash Bros. He has also talked about the uncertainty of Smash Bros. continuing without him at the helm.
