What if SpongeBob SquarePants joined Super Smash Bros?

From Bikini Bottom to Battlefield, Nickelodeon’s biggest star would test Smash’s oldest boundary.

SpongeBob SquarePants is exactly the kind of character Super Smash Bros. should never touch.

He is also, inconveniently, one of the easiest outsiders to imagine.

Created by Stephen Hillenburg, a marine science educator turned animator, SpongeBob first appeared on Nickelodeon in 1999 and almost immediately became more than a children’s cartoon character. He was a fry cook, a jellyfisher, a boating school menace and a neighbourly source of psychological damage to Squidward Tentacles, but the appeal was never just the list of activities. SpongeBob works because he is sincere to a fault, childish without becoming cynical, irritating without being cruel, and optimistic enough to make a clarinet player consider moving house at least once per episode.

That personality has carried him far beyond the usual life expectancy of a children’s television phenomenon. By 2026, SpongeBob SquarePants had passed 330 episodes and entered its seventeenth season, with the wider franchise expanding through spin-offs, specials, four main SpongeBob films and two streaming spin-off features. SpongeBob is not simply a long-running Nicktoon any more. He is arguably Nickelodeon’s clearest mascot, and one of the few animated characters who still feels current long after most of his peers would have faded into retro lunchbox territory.

That staying power gives him a slightly strange audience profile. The original target audience was children, obviously, but many of those children are now adults who still carry the show around as shared cultural language. SpongeBob quotes became playground currency, then meme vocabulary, then nostalgic shorthand. The result is one of those rare animated properties that can still speak to children while being deeply lodged in the minds of people who first watched it on square televisions. He is not The Simpsons, which has built its own impossible monument over decades, but as a modern animated comedy brand with generational reach, SpongeBob is closer to that conversation than most characters will ever get.

The wider franchise has also grown well beyond television. SpongeBob has moved through stage productions, theme park attractions, resort experiences and dedicated physical spaces, including Bikini Bottom-themed areas and a Pineapple Villa inspired by his undersea home. There are cartoon characters with brand extensions, and then there is SpongeBob, who has somehow become both a meme format and a holiday booking.

Then comes the part that makes this Deviation more awkward: SpongeBob has a much larger video game history than the easy dismissal suggests.

His first dedicated SpongeBob game, SpongeBob SquarePants: Legend of the Lost Spatula, arrived on Game Boy Color in 2001, only two years after the show began. Since then, the franchise has built up a sizeable SpongeBob-branded video game catalogue, well past forty releases depending on how strictly the licensed catalogue is counted, before even reaching the broader Nicktoons appearances. Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, The Cosmic Shake, The Patrick Star Game and Titans of the Tide have all kept the franchise visible on modern Nintendo hardware. He has also appeared across three Nickelodeon Kart Racers games, Nickelodeon Extreme Tennis and, most pointedly, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2.

SpongeBob may not be a video game character by birth, but he has spent more time in games than plenty of characters who are treated with far less suspicion.

Absorbent, Yellow, and Not From a Game

However generous the framing becomes, SpongeBob still breaks Smash’s longest-standing roster boundary.

Super Smash Bros. has stretched itself in many directions, but it has always presented its roster as a celebration of video game history. The guest characters may come from rival companies, arcade cabinets, RPGs, fighting games, platformers, open-world sandboxes and strange little corners of Nintendo’s own past, but they all begin from games. Even Mr. Monopoly, as absurd as that earlier Smash Deviation was, came from a game first. A board game, granted, but still a game.

SpongeBob does not have that cover. He is not a forgotten gaming mascot with a television adaptation. He is a television icon with a long and unusually active gaming afterlife. Nobody hears SpongeBob’s name and thinks first of a Game Boy Color platformer. They think of Nickelodeon, Bikini Bottom and the show.

For Smash, perception counts almost as much as history. A character can have all the mechanics in the world and still feel wrong if the audience reads them as arriving from outside the medium. SpongeBob’s gaming catalogue is big enough to make the case interesting, but his television identity is so dominant that it almost overwhelms the discussion before it begins.

The reaction would be fierce. The Smash audience can be warm, excited and generous when a reveal catches the right mood, but it is not shy about rejection either. Byleth’s reveal for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is still remembered partly because of the backlash around yet another Fire Emblem swordfighter joining the roster. How inspired. And that was a Nintendo character from a major contemporary release. SpongeBob would not just be “another sword character” or “the wrong Nintendo pick”. He would be a challenge to what Smash is supposed to be celebrating.

There is also the danger of Smash looking as if it had borrowed a famous face simply because the face was famous. The series does not need that. Smash is one of the most successful and influential crossover game series in the medium, and its roster carries weight because the inclusions usually feel tied to gaming’s own history. SpongeBob would risk making the door look wider than Nintendo might ever want it to look.

Once a Nickelodeon character joins, the old “what about Goku?” argument stops being a meme and starts filling out the official documentation.

Did SpongeBob Already Get the Wrong Invitation?

The Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl problem makes the whole thing even stranger.

Smash has welcomed traditional fighting game icons like Ryu, Ken, Terry and Kazuya, and those inclusions make sense because they acknowledge genres that helped shape competitive game design. Nintendo has also found room for Little Mac, a boxer from a boxing game, and Min Min, representing whatever the hell ARMS was meant to be. The point is not that Smash avoids fighting-adjacent characters. It clearly does not.

But taking a character who already appears in a game so openly built in Smash’s image would be a different kind of move. It would not feel like homage. It would feel like Smash absorbing one of its own reflections.

A SpongeBob moveset would therefore have to be careful. Copy too much from Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and the character feels second-hand. Avoid those games too aggressively and the design risks ignoring existing platform-fighter language that fans already associate with him. Worse, if Smash somehow produced the definitive SpongeBob fighter, it would inevitably make Nickelodeon’s own series look less essential. Why would a SpongeBob fan gravitate towards Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl if the bigger, better-known and more expressive platform fighter had already given him the cleaner interpretation?

That is a strange bit of brand tension to volunteer for, especially when Smash has nothing to prove in that space.

The adaptation challenge is more specific than simply asking whether a cartoon character should be allowed. Smash would have to build a version of SpongeBob that feels rooted in his own gaming history, without looking as if it had borrowed homework from a franchise that borrowed Smash’s homework first.

SpongeBob SquarePants, Video Game Icon?

The strongest counterargument is not that SpongeBob secretly began in games. He did not. The better argument is that Smash could choose to adapt SpongeBob through his gaming history rather than merely importing the cartoon whole.

There is enough material to do that. Battle for Bikini Bottom gave SpongeBob a platforming identity built around bubbles, bashing and simple environmental interaction. The Cosmic Shake expanded the modern 3D platformer side of the character, while Titans of the Tide continued that line by pairing SpongeBob and Patrick in a ghostly platforming adventure. The fact that The Patrick Star Game exists at all is also quietly useful to the argument. This franchise is large enough that its secondary idiot got his own physics sandbox, and somehow that is not even the strangest thing on the list.

Not every SpongeBob game belongs in a museum, unless the museum has a very specific corridor for licensed platformers with suspiciously cheerful box art. But the high points show SpongeBob can work as a game character when developers understand his physicality. He is elastic, readable and expressive. He can spin, stretch, bounce, absorb impact, panic, recover and somehow keep smiling. Those are not just cartoon traits. In the right hands, they become the foundation of how he plays.

SpongeBob also separates himself from the usual non-gaming crossover fantasy. A lot of screen-first characters have video games because popularity made them easy to license. SpongeBob has that too, of course, but he also has a recognisable platforming vocabulary. The bubbles, spatulas and jellyfishing already do plenty of work, with the wider machinery of Bikini Bottom waiting around the edges. Smash would not need to invent a personality from scratch.

The better version would be selective. SpongeBob’s show should provide the character, humour, animation style and broader world, but his games should provide the foundation. A Smash fighter built entirely from random episode references could become noisy very quickly. A fighter rooted in his platforming history, with cartoon references used as emphasis, would feel much cleaner.

There is also one crucial character detail that helps more than it should. SpongeBob genuinely believes he can fight. Not maliciously, obviously. He is still SpongeBob. But through his beloved art of Kah-Rah-Tay, his adventures with Sandy, and his long history of accidentally surviving danger, he has a built-in combat fantasy. The Stardew Valley Farmer argument had to justify peaceful labour becoming effective violence. SpongeBob requires less twisting. He already thinks he is a martial artist, which is both useful for Smash and extremely funny, because he is usually one loud glove snap away from disaster.

That is a surprisingly usable fighter identity. He would not need to be a technical martial artist or a heavyweight gag character. He could be a light, quick, close-range mascot brawler whose strength comes from elasticity, bubbles, tools and accidental chaos. The appeal would be in making him approachable without making him shallow. New players should understand him immediately; better players should find timing, movement and commitment beneath the bright surface.

Smash has always been better at oddballs than its own serious crossover branding sometimes suggests. Luigi is basically heroic anxiety in overalls. Pichu hurts itself by existing. King Dedede is a royal clown with a hammer and a grudge. Captain Falcon had so little visible characterisation in F-Zero that Smash practically turned him into a folk hero by yelling two words and hitting people very hard. SpongeBob would be strange, yes, but he would not be the first fighter whose personality gets louder once Smash starts exaggerating it.

The actual design space is not thin. If anything, the danger is having too much material and no discipline. SpongeBob would need restraint more than invention, because the easiest version would drown in references. The more interesting version would understand what he is in games: a cheerful platforming body who turns simple actions into slapstick problem-solving.

So the question is not whether SpongeBob has enough to pull from. It is whether all that noise can be shaped into something Smash would actually want to invite in.

How SpongeBob Could Fight in Smash

A good SpongeBob moveset has one job before anything else: avoid becoming a sketch compilation. The show provides the personality, but the games should provide the spine. That means bubbles, karate, spatulas, jellyfishing tools and reef-blower chaos, all arranged around a quick, elastic platforming brawler rather than a walking reference reel.

He should feel bright, readable and slightly slippery. Not helpless, not obnoxiously random, and definitely not a serious martial artist. SpongeBob’s ideal Smash identity is a cheerful close-range all-rounder who survives through movement, pressure, soft chaos and complete overconfidence.