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10-year-old Karissa Bannister beating grown men in Super Smash Bros. Wii U turns out to be a publicity stunt for a GameStop commercial

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Posted by Cheng Kai 'KarbyP' Sim • November 9, 2014 at 3:23 p.m. PST • Comments: 56

Yesterday, news of a 10-year-old girl, Karissa, beating fully-grown men in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U at a pre-release GameStop event broke on the Interwebs and promptly wormed its way into the Smash community's hearts.


"I wished I had a daughter like that," a Smash player who was at the venue said on camera as he filmed using his phone a video of Karissa playing at GameStop. "Everyone wishes they had a daughter like that," another Smash fan chimed in.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the whole thing was staged. Karissa had been hired to attend the Super Smash Bros. Wii U pre-release event, along with about 5 to 6 planted actors, allegedly for a GameStop commercial.


Click images for bigger versions

Regardless of the facts of the matter, what we found most interesting was that Karissa is actually really good at Smash, unlike most actors or actresses hired for video game commercials.

As you can see in these videos below, she's actually pretty decent at Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. Her Diddy Kong, especially, looked legit. Props to Karissa for actually being solid at the game -- I think she may even be better than me at it.
At the moment, the Smash community appears to be split in terms of their reaction to finding out that this was an engineered publicity stunt.

Some members of the community thought that this was still awesome, even if it was a publicity stunt for a commercial. But many were also genuinely upset to find out about this as they were led to believe that it was genuine.

What do you guys think about this? Should GameStop have handled things differently?

Source: NeoGAF and R/SmashBros. Image from @xD1x. Sent in by zUkUu.
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