Franchises NOT represented in the SSB Series

[Boo Destroyer]

This may derail, but if Brawl is guilty of one thing, I'd say that it's pretending that the Wario Land games don't exist.

Too much focus on WarioWare, but even that failed at overall representation.

[nocturnal YL]

I don't like how in the Snake codec, Colonel commented how Wario "realy made his name in the WarioWare games." Surely Wario was famous before even the first WarioWare, and how he's one of the most wanted character from Melee (but being cut in favor of Peach because he's still considered a Mario character back then)?

[Fryguy64]

Ownership of franchises is always tricky. If a game is using a first party license then you can work that out easily enough.

A surprising amount of rights-retention issues seems to stem from either Nintendo approaching and funding a company to create a game (as happened with Sin & Punishment) or whether Nintendo picked up the game during development (which usually means the original developer maintains the rights). It's not a golden rule, but it's usually a good place to start... but only if you know how it happened.

Eternal Darkness is tricky... What with Silicon Knights discussing creating a sequel for next-gen consoles, you would assume they managed to retain the rights to the series. But Nintendo patented the sanity effect, which I imagine would mean future games in the series not developed for Nintendo couldn't use it (and in that case, would it be an Eternal Darkness game any more?)

Treasure is a high profile development studio with an impressive back catalogue, and publishers fight over each other to work with them. Treasure doesn't own the rights to the series it creates, but I expect they have some kind of exclusivity agreement with the publisher that Treasure will be responsible for any sequels. You can't take too many chances, I guess.

[Hiker of Games]

Silicon Knights could always make ED2 on the Wii.

They won't though, since they don't particularly like the Wii.