Minigun

Lore & Background

In the broader Smash universe, items are fragments of power torn from the many worlds that converge on the Battlefield. The Minigun fits neatly into the lineage of military hardware that has drifted across dimensions—echoing the kind of overpowered, absurd weaponry that characters like Samus or the Smash 4-era DLC roster would recognize from their own sci-fi or action-adventure origins. Its presence in Brawl's item pool suggested a world where a rotary cannon is just another thing you might pick up between a round of basketball and a bout with a giant hammer.

What makes the Minigun feel at home in Smash's chaotic logic is its sheer scale. It is not a sidearm; it is a shoulder-mounted industrial machine that dwarfs the character holding it. The visual gag of a tiny fighter or a heavyweight both gripping the same bulky barrel and spinning it like a top is part of the game's long tradition of letting any character interact with any object on equal footing. The item does not care whether it is in the hands of a plumber or a sword-wielding princess; it simply spins and spits lead.

In Ultimate, the Minigun's return was greeted with the same grin it earned in Brawl: a reminder that the series' item pool is not just about utility but about spectacle. Watching the barrel blur into a solid disc of motion while a character crouches under a hail of pellets is a small, self-contained moment of cartoonish violence that captures the franchise's spirit perfectly.

In Their Own Story

The arena lights hummed their low, electric thrum. Pallets of crates rattled overhead on their invisible tracks, and the distant crowd—some of them floating, some of them made of star—chanted in a language that had no words, only rhythm.

Then it dropped. A heavy, metallic thud cracked the floor tiles. The Minigun sat in the center of the stage, its barrel still, its spinning mechanism cold. For a heartbeat, nobody moved. Four characters circled it in a slow, wary orbit, each calculating, each waiting.

A small, round figure broke first. It skidded in, grabbed the barrel with both hands, and the world went white with noise. The gun roared to life, the cylinder blurring into a solid ring of steel, and a river of tiny, screaming bullets carved a trench through the air. The other three scattered, bounced off the stage edge, and came back swinging.

The Minigun did not care. It kept spinning. It kept firing. And for eleven glorious seconds, the Battlefield belonged to the sound of a machine that had no business existing in a place where a giant hammer and a living sword were just Tuesday.

Reader's Guide

Pick up the Minigun and you become a temporary turret. Hold your aim direction and the barrel will spin, spitting a continuous stream of small bullets that travel in a straight line. Each individual pellet deals modest damage, but the volume of fire means you can chip opponents down quickly or, at higher combined percentages, knock them off-stage in a satisfying burst.

Aim matters more than you might expect. The stream is not a shotgun spread; it is a focused line. Aiming upward can catch airborne opponents, while a low, horizontal stream acts as a floor-level denial tool. You can change direction mid-fire, which lets you track a moving target, though the transition costs a fraction of a second where the barrel is reorienting.

The big limitation is ammo. The Minigun holds a finite number of bullets and will shatter once they are spent. In a four-player match, a single pickup can be exhausted in under ten seconds, so treat it as a burst weapon rather than a sustained one. Competitive players generally rank it below top-tier items like the Laser or the Home-Run Bat, but in a casual or party context its ease of use and screen-filling spectacle make it a crowd-pleaser. If you are new, grab it, aim at the nearest opponent, and let the spin do the talking.

Did You Know?

• The Minigun's barrel visibly spins faster the longer you hold the fire button, creating a satisfying acceleration that makes it feel more powerful than its per-bullet damage suggests.
• In Brawl, the Minigun was one of the items that could be picked up by most characters, but its sheer size made it a visual comedy when smaller fighters like Kirby or Pikachu gripped it.
• The item's rapid-fire stream can hit multiple opponents simultaneously if they are aligned in the aimed direction, making it unexpectedly effective in chaotic four-player matches.
• The Minigun's return in Ultimate was accompanied by the same spinning-barrel sound effect that became a small cult favorite among Brawl-era players, who had spent years associating that specific whine with chaotic party