Real World (SSS)

:This article is strictly about how the Real World appeared in Super Smash Stadium. For information about it in general, close this tab, turn your damn computer off, and go outside. -_-;
The Real World is a retired stage on Super Smash Stadium.
Officially, it debuted on the Season 12 premiere and was the 55th stage to debut; however, likely due to its gimmick (listed below), this stage was teased nearly a whole month in advance with a special week of episodes done solely to promote it. It was played 173 times over its lifetime.
==Stage overview==
This stage actually took place inside someone's house, à la Mario Kart Live Home Circuit! What happened was that prospective home viewers would send in postcards to SSS about a month in advance. The producers then picked a "winner" at random; the winner was then called in advance and appeared on the show live, via satellite, and they would set up a location in their house to be an SSS stage. (St. Clair Publications would actually provide a video camera to those who didn't have one.) The home viewer called the shots as to what the stage looked like.
Because of this, the layout of this stage changed every time it was played on, with different layouts, gimmicks, and stage hazards, usually in the form of a dog or cat. (Since the fighters were green-screened onto the field, the dogs, cats, etc. wouldn't feel the fighters "hitting" them, and thus wouldn't get hurt.) The show's hosts claimed that the show was using "special computer software" on the green screen display that was "smart" enough to recognize hazards, but at least one playing shows Mario and Link fighting on what's clearly intended to be spikes, without incident.
This stage had a "quirk" to it where it would always go on hiatus between November and January while the show did its then-yearly "Home Viewer Smash" contest; evidently, this was done so the two promotions wouldn't conflict. Also, between 1986 and 1988, there was a "Smash Along" promo where home viewers would get a cut of any contestant's winnings (with a T-shirt as a consolation prize); this stage was ineligible for that promotion, again likely to avoid conflicts.
This stage was only ever played second or third. It's unclear why it was never played first, but a former show producer claimed in an interview in the 2000's that, since the home viewer was called before a taping began and was kept on hold until it was time to play, playing this stage in the second half would have required keeping them on hold longer than what they considered to be polite.
The contestant's winnings from playing on this stage would be split evenly with the home viewer. Despite never physically being at the studio, home viewers nevertheless lost their eligibility to be contestants...at least until 2007, when the rules changed.
==Changes==
None.
==Why it was retired==
By 1989, with interest in game show home viewer promotions waning, the show's staff thought that the stage was beginning to take too much time and effort to set up and play, often for very little effort, as winning contestants rarely won more than $3,000 on what was supposed to be a flagship game. Hence, it was retired. It looked like this stage was going to go into its usual hiatus for the Home Viewer Smash, but such a Smash wasn't done until April 1990, and that wound up being the last regular HVS. (They tried to bring the HVS back in 2011, with no success.)
==In its own universe==
The "real world" is where you live. Duh.
The name comes from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and its successors. Multiple Nintendo-related media, including The World of Nintendo, depict the Nintendo universe as being in a completely different universe from our own, connected by pipes inexplicably located in Brooklyn rather than through Nintendo itself or its American HQ in Redmond, Washington. St. Clair Publications ran with this.
The idea for the stage comes from the fact that in the 1980's, "home viewer" promotions were extremely popular on game shows. The Price is Right had its "Home Viewer Showcases", and later "Play Along" and the Phone Home Game, and Press Your Luck had a "Home Viewer Spin", while multiple attempts were made to combine game shows with home shopping, all of which failed in spectacular ways.
Super Smash Stadium also had its own abundance of home viewer contests at the time as noted above, and even to this day, SSS has a $5,000 online lottery done after the third round.