I don't, just like you don't. But I know even people that never played Earthbound knew what it was. And I know it was something that could be played before Smash came out.
That doesn't matter. I didn't say people knew his background and everything. But he is a character from F-Zero, the main character, one of only four characters. He was in two popular games that both came out before the first Smash game. The first F-Zero was also a Nintendo game on their biggest system, more people probably played F-Zero than people that owned N64s.None of this changes what I said. As I said before you couldn't even see Captain Falcon anywhere besides the manual in the original F-Zero. F-Zero X was the first time he actually appeared in-game and still you barely saw him. His popularity is definitely mostly Smash.
People aren't some hive mind. Not everyone knows who all those characters are, and naturally when writing about who they'd like to see, they brought up characters they knew of. Although I can't say I saw much of any complaining about Iron Fist, by Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 he was one of the Marvel character people seemingly most wanted in there.Okay then explain why there were people complaining about characters like Rocket Raccoon, Nova, Iron Fist, Dormammu, X-23, Taskmaster, Spencer and hell even Arthur and Hawkeye had a good number of complaints when they were revealed as well. People were pretty much saying "Who are these guys?! I don't know them! They suck! It should have been Gambit and Venom instead!"
There were comic book fans here complaining about characters like Rocket Raccoon being there, and unlike people on a fighting game board, those people presumably knew who Rocket Raccoon was. Most people on fighting game forums didn't seem to have a clue who Rocket Raccoon was, he was just some weird raccoon guy. When they saw gameplay of Rocket Raccoon, the talk about the character seemed to pretty quickly change from the time of the leak. There was probably more complaining here about how Black Panther or someone else wasn't there than in other places.
People wanted Gambit and Venom because: They were in previous games, they were popular in those games, they were fun to play, they were visually interesting, and they had cool moves. Gambit was seemingly a big enough character that SNK later did their own version of him in KoF. There were also complaints about how Blackheart wasn't there, and as we know, Blackheart isn't some huge character.
No one was saying Gambit should be there over Spencer and Arthur, at least not anyone with any understanding of how the Marvel Vs Capcom thing works.
The Internet has been extremely common since like the early '90s.The internet is a lot more common now that is was back then and has allowed "freedom of speech" for those who were once speechless. Especially now that we have sites like Youtube.