This month marks 10 years since I attended my first Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, something that I had no idea at the time would radically change my life. To commemorate this, I wanted to talk about my history with the game and how it has impacted me.
Early Years
My first experience with the Super Smash Bros. series was in the 3rd grade, when a classmate showed me the E3 2006 trailer for the then upcoming Brawl one morning before class.
Truly a revolutionary moment for a young me.
I had never heard of the series before this, and had no idea who most of the characters in the video were, but I was still instantly mesmerized by how cool the game and the characters looked. He told me that this was actually going to be the 3rd game in the series, and that there was already one on the GameCube called Melee. Thankfully, I did have a GameCube that was primarily a Sonic Riders machine for me at the time. I was fully on the hype train for Brawl from that point on, and was desperate to get Melee and play it. I spent many days after school looking up information about Melee on the school computers before my mom took me home, thinking about how awesome it would be to get to play it. I eventually convinced my parents to buy Melee for me at Walmart, and it was hard to contain my excitement. I came home and hurriedly rushed to my room to put the disc in my GameCube and was greeted by the amazing intro cutscene. I’m sure all Melee fans remember how great it is.
Doesn't get much better than this.
It was through playing Melee that I discovered many other games that would eventually become some of my all time favorites. As previously mentioned, I knew almost none of the characters in this game or the Brawl trailer. It was limited to just the Mario characters and Pikachu. It was through Melee that I was introduced to characters like Link, Samus, and Ness, all of which come from games that would eventually become some of my favorites. Before this, the only game series that I was particularly into was Sonic, so you can imagine my excitement when he was eventually announced for Brawl.
Will I ever be more excited than 10-year old me was when he saw this? Not sure.
I actually had some knowledge of the competitive scene for Melee even then, since I first got the game in 2007. This was 6 years after the game first released in 2001, and the early competitive scene was well underway by that point. When I looked up information about the game, I could find that Fox was supposed to be the best character in the game, so I picked him for a while when playing against some of my friends. I also saw that someone named Ken was considered the best player, who played Marth, so I picked up that character for sometime before the release of Brawl. Of course, once Brawl finally released, I played that game constantly, and Melee fell by the wayside for me.
Joining the Competitive Scene
I rediscovered Melee in my junior year of high school, when a classmate was into the game and asked if I had ever played it. I told him I had, but not since I was a kid. I never fully lost interest in the Smash series. In fact, at this point I was heavily excited for and actively speculating on the upcoming Smash game, commonly called Smash 4. However, I was convinced to pick up Melee again and we started playing the game together. Eventually, I found on Facebook, 10 years ago this month, that there was supposed to be a Melee tournament at a local card game shop and so we decided to go and try our luck against new people. This would turn out to be a life-changing decision for me.
I don’t remember exactly how I did, but I know it wasn’t great. I had some practice with some of the most important techniques, but I wasn’t very consistent at all. I distinctly remember attempting to go for a Ken combo, a famous Marth combo named after the aforementioned player, but completely missed and lost a stock as a result. Despite this, I was still very happy to have gone. I had never found a hobby or extracurricular that I particularly enjoyed during school, and I struggled a lot with social anxiety, so I was very excited to find a community of people who also enjoyed something I did.
I got my driver’s license not long after this first tournament, so the first time I would drive outside of my hometown in London, KY would be to attend a Melee tournament an hour away in Richmond. It was here that I would meet some of my closest friends today for the first time. I would win one set before losing twice to be eliminated, but I did get to play the tournament organizer in the bracket, which was exciting for me at the time. You can actually find the bracket here where my tag is “Farko”. I also got to play a doubles set on the live stream which you can see here. Major shout-outs to Xanthus for running this event and keeping these videos online for us to see all these years later.
While you can't see me in the webcam, you can see my Marth's propensity for foward-smashing.
This tournament in particular was especially important since it was where I became introduced to the wider Kentucky Melee scene that I would become an active member of in the years to come. I met many new people, of which several would become dear friends, and I got to travel to numerous states that I had never been to before to attend tournaments. One particularly interesting event I went to during this time was WTFox, a major tournament in Memphis, TN where Mango and Leffen, two of the game’s most famous players, commentated a set I played on stream. As you might expect, they didn’t mention anything about my gameplay, but it was still a fun experience.
Even though I lost terribly in front of the world, at least I was representing the Mother 3 shirt.
I started attending Smashfests, house events where everyone played Melee, and weekly tournaments in the central Kentucky area frequently in the coming years. I even hosted my own weekly tournament series at my college for a brief time. Despite me struggling in my college work during these years, I still had Melee to fall back on as a source of fun and reprieve from my academic woes. During 2018, a year where I decided to take a break from college, I focused even harder on Melee, practicing the game and traveling more than ever to attend events, creating some lasting memories. This would keep going on until the end of 2018 with the release of the new Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Smash 5
In 2019, I largely stopped playing Melee in favor of Ultimate, becoming an active member of that game’s local community. I arguably had more success in my relatively short time with this game than I did in Melee. I was ranked in the top 15 of the state, made top 8 at a regional level tournament, and was voted “Favorite Player” by the local community that year. I never achieved similar results in Melee before this point. Because of various differences between Melee and the Smash games that succeeded it, mainly in that the newer games have slower and less explosive gameplay, it’s rare for Melee players to also play these new games. In our scene, only two other Melee players would pick up Ultimate as more than a passing curiosity and achieve similar or greater success. Players who came from the Smash 4 scene often saw me as being a Melee player first and foremost, a consequence of these games having largely separate communities. Personally though, I saw myself as being a general Smash player who simply preferred Melee, as I’ve been open to the idea of playing different games and have entered a tournament for every official Smash title as well as some unofficial ones.
I think we can agree that this was my finest moment during my time with Ultimate.
I entered 2020 feeling confident and optimistic about my Ultimate performance. I had even just gained a sponsorship with a local organization that would pay for tournament entry fees. This would unforunately come to an end with the start of the COVID pandemic that year. With in-person tournaments on pause, the only way to play the game with other people was using the notoriously poor online play. I tried this for a few months, but eventually stopped having fun because of the poor online experience. However, around this time, a Melee mod called Slippi was released that allowed for smooth online play that far exceeded Ultimate’s. Naturally, I started to pick Melee back up using Slippi. While in-person tournaments were on pause for the remainder of 2020 and partway into 2021, Slippi was the only way I played any Smash game online. Once tournaments returned, I continued to play Ultimate for about a year, but a combination of the online experience, a changing metagame, and the release of new characters made the game less enjoyable for me. So, I started to attend Melee tournaments again.
This second Melee run was more successful for me. I had improved my mentality towards competition through playing Ultimate, and I was able to apply that to Melee. Because of this, I became locally ranked in Melee for the first time, becoming one of only 3 people in the state to be ranked in both Melee and any of its sequels. My Melee improvement was hampered somewhat though because I also decided to dip my toes into some other fighting games. Around this time I picked up Guilty Gear Strive, a more traditional fighting game. Traditional fighting games would be games that derive themselves from the gameplay and controls of Street Fighter 2, whereas the Smash series has an entirely different control scheme and gameplay feel. Fighting games that play like Smash are instead commonly called platform fighters. I had played some traditional fighters casually as a child, but this would be the first time I would start attending tournaments for them.
One of my most interesting sets from my time with Strive.
I would dabble in some of these games for the next few years, while still continuing to enter Melee events. My two most notable achievements were likely winning a local event for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, using the same team I used when I played casually as a young teen, and making it far into the bracket of a Street Fighter 6 regional event near the game’s launch. However, I would eventually start to distance myself from the genre as I realized that I simply had more fun with the unrestricted movement in the platform fighter genre. This became most obvious a few months ago with the release of Rivals of Aether 2, a platform fighter that combines elements from Melee, the later Smash games, and its own original mechanics to create a fighting game that I found more fun than any other in recent years. While I don’t think I can ever fully stop playing Melee, Rivals 2 has captured a lot of my attention since its release. We’ll see how far I’ll be able to take the game.
It’s interesting to see that all of this history really does lead right back to Melee. That morning in 3rd grade where I saw the Brawl trailer for the first time may have been one of the most important in my life. It was there that my love for the Smash series started, which would end up changing my life. It was through Melee and Brawl that I discovered many of the games that I now love immensely, largely starting my love for gaming in general. Competitive Melee would give me friends that I cherish to this day, motivation to improve myself, and the courage to overcome my social anxiety. I may not have ever become involved with all the other games I’ve played competitively if I didn’t already have my experience with Melee. I truly hope that everyone can have something that can change their lives like Melee has mine. Here’s to many more decades of Melee.