LOS ANGELES, CA—When a new Smash Bros. game is introduced, it's not so much an announcement as it is a long series of announcements. New characters are revealed one by one across several months at various Nintendo events and in Nintendo Direct livestreams, each time prompting a small flurry of news coverage and tweets.

Nintendo does this for a reason, naturally—Smash Bros. is a big, system-selling franchise that can be counted on to move units for years after it's released, and building up those months of hype keeps the anticipation at a low, continuous simmer instead of a blink-and-you-miss-it boil. Nintendo pursued the same strategy with Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and it's obviously still effective.

It's also entirely artificial—not that that really matters to Smash fans. At a developer roundtable on Tuesday evening, Smash Bros. creator and director Masahiro Sakurai told the assembled press that the character roster for the new Smash game had been in place since essentially the beginning of development—the work that goes into balancing the game is so extensive that integrating new characters later on could be disruptive.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

That means that even though the Mii Fighter, Patulena, and Pac-Man were all announced as new playable characters at E3 this week, the work of building those character models and integrating them into the game has been going on for far longer. This isn't surprising—it's just the way Nintendo markets upcoming Smash Bros. games to hardcore fans. The company is all too willing to toy with fans' emotions for months, only to announce some obvious feature that we all knew would always end up being in the game somehow.

Case in point: the new GameCube to Wii U controller adapter. Smash fans love their GameCube controllers, and the original Wii's GameCube controller ports meant that many Smash Bros. players have been using the same controller for well over a decade across both Melee and Brawl. Nintendo was never going to leave these people out in the cold, but the confirmation of the adapter was enough to generate news all on its own.

The company is taking a similar approach with older characters like Captain Falcon and Ness, characters who have been in every version of the game going all the way back to the Nintendo 64 but haven't been confirmed for the new title. They're practically guaranteed to be in the game, but Nintendo drops just enough characters from every new roster that fans are overjoyed and relieved when their favorite fighter is confirmed.

Spending some time at the Super Smash Bros. Invitational at the Nokia Theatre in LA.

It's clear that Sakurai and Nintendo are deeply attuned to what Smash fans like, and that extends to the competitive community—Sakurai talked extensively about the challenges of balancing the game at the developer talk, and he appeared onstage at a huge Super Smash Bros. invitational competition at the Nokia Theatre on Tuesday afternoon to show support for the competitive community. The 16 competitors there became the first to play the new Wii U Smash game in front of a live audience, and they couldn't have picked a more enthusiastic group.

There was cosplay. There was wild cheering every time anyone pulled off an impressive move. Clear fan-favorite characters emerged (Smash fans seem especially enthusiastic about Mega Man, who managed to move forward in the "fan favorite" matches decided by polling the audience).

Nintendo obviously recognizes the strategic importance of Smash Bros. to its holiday season—it's a system-selling game, but it's also one of the precious few major titles on the company's release calendar between now and 2015. Continuing to build buzz around the title is going to be crucial to the Wii U's next year as Nintendo attempts to capitalize on the sales bump afforded by games like Smash and Mario Kart 8, the latter of which has reportedly already helped Wii U sales. Turning that bump into a trend is going to take some work, but at least Smash Bros. fans are still in Nintendo's corner.