Game Theory - The Deadly Physics of the Falcon Punch! (Super Smash Bros Captain Falcon)

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the science and real life implications of Captain Falcon's Falcon Punch! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Alan Baker   Editors: Tyler Mascola, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Forrest Lee and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Your word is Falcon Punch. Falcon Punch. F-A-L-C-O-N-C-H. Falcon Punch. Oh, I'm sorry. That's incorrect. Contestant number two, same word. Falcon Punch. F-A-L-C-O-N space, P-U-N-C-H, Falcon Punch.

Sorry, that's still not right. Contestant number three, your turn. Can you use it in a sentence, please? at 140% with three stock lives until I Falcon Punched his noob butt off the stage. Falcon Punch. F-A-L-C-O-N. P-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-W-N-C-H-Falkin-P-N-C-H-Falkin-Punch. That is correct.

Yes! Oh, Internet, welcome to Game Theory, where I'm exercising three times a week to get rid of a little paunch of my own. We're talking about Nintendo's overlooked bounty hunter, Captain Falcon. You know, come to think of it, for a family-friendly brand, a lot of Nintendo's heroes, quote-unquote, are employed in the business of viciously hunting down other people for profit. Captain Falcon, and yeah, I'm looking at you, too, Sammas. For those of you who might not be aware, Captain Falcon was originally intended to be the

mascot of the Super Famicom, but for whatever reason didn't make an appearance until the original F-Zero as one of four playable racers. Even though it's not explicitly stated that he is the main character of the franchise, putting him on a the front of the box art and given him his own eight-page comic in the manual wasn't exactly subtle. He also has one of, if not the, best theme song I've ever heard for a video game character. Listen to this. We don't deserve him. We really don't. But seriously, how many of you have sat there watching around the Smash Bros and asked yourselves,

how fast would I have to punch to create an explosive flaming falcon around my fist? Well, if that person is you, this episode is for all one of you. With our flaming fist of a question in mind, I demand, I demand only one thing out of you theorists. Show me your moves! And buckle up, safety is never a joke. Let's go! So, first question, what exactly is happening when he's punching?

Where is that fire coming from? Well, it's not exactly the air that's catching fire, but the object in motion. While oxygen is indeed part of the combustion triangle, we see that we need two more things. Heat and fuel. In the captain's case, heat and fuel are actually one in the same, his gloves. So how do we catch something on fire using leather, speed, and oxygen? Sounds like a really lame band.

can actually be explained pretty easily. Air is a fluid, so when you move your hand through the air, the molecules that make up the air will move around your hand. But if you take something with a wide surface area, say a fan you flap, you'll notice that it requires a bit more work because now you have more drag, or friction created by the wind resistance. In most cases, the wind will cause things to cool down. It's why you can stick your head out the window of a moving car without fear of setting your face on fire. But when you're going really fast, and I mean, really, really fast, there comes a point when the air just creates so much friction that the object in question begins to heat up. Take a shuttle coming back in from space. Upon reentry, we're always shown this red-hot, fiery glow on the bottom of the spacecraft.

In this case, the ship is moving so fast that the molecules don't have time to get out of the way, and they start to compress, thereby creating heat. Now, there are a number of things different between Captain Falcon's fist and a shuttle upon re-entry, but the principle stays the same. He needs to move his fist so fast that the air in front of his fist becomes compressed and creates friction against his leather glove. When the friction creates enough heat to catch fire, we have ourselves the iconic flaming fist. So, how fast is his fist moving in the Smash games? Looks like we'll need the captain to, quite literally, show us his moves. Captain Falcon is one of the eight original fighters in Smash, and he's been in every single game since.

With the Switch being the most powerful system, it's probably closest to how Nintendo imagines the attack to be, therefore the most accurate rendition to date. But for the sake of crossing all the eyes and dotting all the T's, let me explain why we're not incorporating the older games into our math. On the N64, the flame actually pops out before the punch is executed. We see the same thing happening in melee and in brawl. On Smash for the Wii U, impact delay is added, and there's one additional Captain Falcon fist length added to the end. And by the way, can we just start using Falcon fist lengths as our new standard unit of measurement? Screw metric and Imperial!

We are all about the Falcon system now. Even sounds cool. Anyways, long story short, in order to keep the frame rate at 60 FPS, animations had to take shortcuts. And since everything's happening so fast anyway, we're given the illusion that the punch is causing the flaming Falcon, when in actuality it's popping up before he has his arm fully extended. But then, my friends, we got Smash Ultimate. Theorists, I kid you not, I nearly cried from the sheer amount of joy that overwhelmed me when I looked at how unbelievably easy Nintendo made it to gather data for this theory.

Some theories require insane levels of creativity, like when we had to use in-game compasses and trigonometry to measure the distance of a moon. But with this, everything is laid out just so... Perfectly. Training mode has a feature that allows you to break down actions frame by frame against a graph paper grid as the game itself perceives them. This means no slowing down a video capture, no interpretations. This is in-engine frame rate giving us a hundred percent accuracy about how fast his fist is actually moving in frames per second. We'll mark the frame in which his fist is fully cocked as frame one, since we need to have a starting point. Frame two, we see the fist across the body, and by frame three we have the full extension giving us three frames of a animation. Using simple division, three frames out of 60 frames in a second gives us 0.05 seconds. So now that we have ourselves the time, the only thing we have to do is figure out how far his fist is actually traveling.

Everything that I've come across online agrees that he is a massive 2.03 meters tall, 6 foot 8 inches. Using the grid in the background and this taunt, we can see that he just about perfectly lines up with two large squares. This lets us know that one large square is going to be equal to 1 meter. So now let's jump back to the frame-by-frame break down on the punch. From frame 1 to frame 3, we see that his fist is traveling three large squares. And given one large square is equal to 1 meter, we know that his fist is traveling 3 meters in the span of 0.05 seconds. All that's left to do now is to throw it into the equation for speed, and we get speed equals 3 meters over 0.05 seconds. Just do a bit of basic division here, and we get 60 meters a second, or a hundred and thirty-four point two miles per hour.

That is a pretty impressive speed, but to bring the air around his fist, to body temperature, 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in case you forgot, he'd need to punch at least 480 miles an hour, roughly 63% the speed of sound. So what gives? His fist isn't traveling fast enough to ignite a fire, so where then is the fire coming from? Well, when I was researching his punch, I couldn't ignore the other attacks that ignite his enemies. That's just be bad practice. Your initial thought might be that all of his flame moves require some sort of fast motion, which makes it seem like his speed is the thing creating the fire, but here's the thing. Not all of them require motion to activate.

In fact, there's one attack where he doesn't move at all. His aerial special has him grabbing an opponent, holding them close, and then flipping off of them after an explosion. No fast movement whatsoever, but how? At no point in F0 does it show him having key powers or the ability to channel his energy into his limbs, and in the anime, because yes, I watched the anime for this theory, the only time a Falcon Punch is used is in a scene at the end when he defeats a black shadow. So where then is all of this power coming through?

Well, shockingly, the answer is from his belt. No joke. If you're like me and didn't know, well, just about anything about Captain Falcon prior to doing two weeks' worth of research about his games in origin, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that his championship racing belt actually houses the creators of the universe within it. In the game F0GX, Captain Falcon races his nemesis death-born in H-Eouble Hockey sticks, wins and he goes to fuse his light belt with Deathborn's Dark Belt to create the Champion Belt, which apparently holds the creators of the universe for reasons. Dark and lights, these two universal forces are condensed in each of our belts.

Didn't you know? As such, the belt houses enough energy to quote, Turn this whole galaxy into a pile of ashes in an instant. Turning things into ashes, aka fire. Anyway, this was my reaction to learning Captain Falcon's lore. Who knew that Thanos-level crises were involved in a high-speed racing game? Also, who knew cutscenes could come as cringy as this? Come off it! You think you can beat me? No way!

So, suffice it to say, it's probably not a big deal for Captain Falcon make a few explosions here and there when he could destroy galaxies just by thinking about him. So, does that wrap us up? Because it leaves me in a strange position. Yes, the champion's belt gives him incredible power, and absolutely solves where the fire could be. coming from, the problem is he's not wearing the belt in the smash games, which means that he's back to just making fire by needing to move super fast. So let's look at the problem a different way. How fast does he need to go in order to make his punches lit a.F? Both theorists, according to information extrapolated from the journal of Australian fire investigators, leather has an ignition point of two hundred and twelve Celsius. So all we have to do is get his fist to a speed that generates two hundred and twelve degrees Celsius or four hundred thirteen degrees Fahrenheit of friction created from compressed air.

Should be easy enough, right? So let's set the stage. Gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky. Wario picks up a Mr. Saturn and chucks it at an unsuspecting Captain Falcon because why wouldn't he use another living creature to attack another living creature? Normally, Captain Falcon would ignore this kind of thing, but Wario has a bounty on his head. Before he can get away, Captain Falcon cocks his fist back, gathers all of his energy into one explosive motion. So here we go! In order for this to work in 0.05 seconds,

Captain Falcon's fist would have to travel 615 meters per second, or 1,375 miles an hour to cover that distance of 3 meters. In other words, he's punching at a speed 2.8 times the speed of sound. Using the formula for kinetic energy, we find out that this would produce 18,0146,535 joules of energy, which translates to 4 kilograms of TNT, enough to blow up a car. But that's not even the most impressive part. Anyone within 67 meters of that punch will be able to feel the force of it going through the ground. Standing 3 meters in front of his fist would kill you.

And if he's within one meter of a small structure, he would demolish the building beyond repair. You are so dead in so many ways that you don't even process the fact that there also happen to be flames around it. Yes, it's a good thing they don't abide by actual physics here, because I'm pretty sure they'd nurf that faster than any future sci-fi raving bounty hunter. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.