Super Smash Bros. Brawl is shaping up to be the ultimate gathering of video game icons available yet. Still, fans are notorious for knowing or wanting to know about these characters’ roots. Luckily, Brawl has been confirmed to includes a “Masterpieces” mode, providing playable demos of some of Nintendo’s most memorable games in history. They’re VC titles, but you won’t need to be connected online to play any of them.

It looks like they will be timed demos as you would see at store kiosks – so no, they won’t be “dead” after 30 days or anything like that. Some of the games you can choose from will come with pre-saved files, too, allowing you to try out different parts of the game. If there’s one way to learn about the history of Nintendo’s characters better than via trophy descriptions, it’s by playing their games. You can check out some screens after the break.

Shown below are thumbs for games in this order: two screens of Super Mario Bros., two screens of Ice Climber, The Legend of Zelda, Kid Icarus, and Kirby’s Adventure all on the NES, two screens of Super Metroid on the Super NES, and Star Fox 64 on the Nintendo 64. Oh, and the screen telling you to stop playing the demo and start playing more Brawl.

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Finally, a little speculation on my part: Pikachu’s debut game isn’t on a platform currently supported on the Virtual Console, but I can’t think of a better way to kick off Game Boy support. After all, we’re seeing handhelds on the service now.

Smash Bros. DOJO!!