Hello!
For anyone who doesn’t know me, which should be almost everybody, my tag is GT and I currently play Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 64. I’m just coming off of attending my last smash major of the summer (Shine 2017) in what was the most active smash summer of my life. As a result of hitting my 4 year milestone of playing smash competitively, I thought I should start a blog about Smash. And what better way to start a blog than to give you a history of my 4 years as a competitor and a person.
2013 (Starting in April)
I would say that competitive smash for me started in the Summer of 2013. I don’t say that in the sense that I used to play smash casually when the game first came out and then found out about competitive smash (although me being 26 and having played loads of video games growing up it would make sense). No, that’s not it. In fact, prior to 2013 there were only two times in my life that I played smash for any amount of time. The first was with Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 in 1999 or 2000 when I got to play it at a summer camp between elementary school years for a few weeks (if that). The second time was during the summer after my senior year in high school where I played Brawl for a month or two with my friends. We were all casuals. To sum up my prior experiences with smash leading up to 2013, it was pretty much nothing.
I had no nostalgia for the game, and no real history with it either. So when I went to study abroad in Japan in 2013 and saw a Melee setup in the lobby of the rec hall at the tiny college campus I was staying on, there was no feeling of “I have to play this game.” However, after a month of going to the lobby and seeing it filled night after night with people, I decided to give it a shot. What could possibly keep these people coming back night after night? They would share controllers and do 4 man free-for-alls on Final Destination with items off where the first 1 or 2 eliminated would rotate off (depending on how many were waiting for a turn). The chance to stay on the setup alone piqued my competitive interest in the game to at least learn about basic tech like wavedashing, teching, and SHFFLing. After all, who wants to be the guy who only gets one shot at playing and has to constantly be rotated off.
I started really wanting to get better, even though I was terrible and could barely manage to short hop consistently and teched on accident. I learned about the techniques, but didn’t know how to actually do them. Despite that, I was putting in major hours at that setup. I even got a Gamecube controller while I was in Japan, which lasted me until 2015, just so I wouldn’t have to worry about inconsistent controller condition. I remember looking up videos on Youtube and finding out about Apex 2013, where Armada–who I barely knew of at the time–had announced his retirement. I remember hearing about Nintendo of America’s cease and desist notice for Melee at Evo, and I remember watching an Ice Climbers player do an infinite to get second at the same tournament.
August was when I returned to the states, but I had played so much Melee in Japan by that time that I considered it another game I could get into and learn about just like I had with Starcraft, League of Legends, and DotA. I found out about Smashboards and would look up combo videos and latest tourney VODs. I found out about netplay and got an emulator to practice on. And then I saw the Smash Brothers documentary.
Up until that documentary my fascination with competitive smash was starting to fade. It was something to do when I wasn’t feeling like playing DotA. It wasn’t something I wanted to dedicate myself to. Having no one to play with was starting to wane my interest in the whole thing. Then I watched the documentary, and watched it again, and again, and again. I shared it with my friends. I talked about it with my parents. I became enthralled with what seemed like such an accepting and kind community compared to the trolls and whiners of online esports. I went to my first tournament shortly after. I decided I’d main Falco because his spike was cool and he was my best character at the time. I played, and I got bopped. The best player at the tournament was DP, also a Falco main, who was from the DC area, which was a 2 hour drive from the location of the tournament. I played against him a few times after the tournament was over and got to meet some people from my college who played melee as well. I tried joining their smash group, but be it my laziness or an unofficial college group’s general lack of planning, I was never able to get any real smash practice with them. I finished out 2013 with many passions: DotA, Smash and Magic the Gathering, but smash was slowly becoming the biggest.
2014
Going into my spring semester of my college year in 2014 was already exciting. I was a senior, and with my classes lined up as they were I would only have to finish one self-study course in the summer to get my degree. For my whole time in college, I never partied or made friends with the people I went to college with. I don’t say that as a way for you to feel sorry for me, I just say that because that is how it was. My friends went to another college I was too lazy to apply to, but I would make the 2-hour drive to see them almost every weekend. I would use my friend’s Wii to play Melee at their place until 4 or 5 am on Friday and Saturday. I would just be in training mode practicing L-cancels, wavedashes and anything else I could work on. I would then drive back down to my college, start my computer and do more of the same on the Gamecube emulator I had on it. Because I didn’t have friends on my home college campus. that basically made me distraction free as I trained hard to become average in a game that so many people cared so little about on a competitive level. I don’t know why I did it, other than to have something to do. To have the journey of becoming OK all the way from being absolutely awful. It was a lot of terrible times that would get most people to quit. I went to a UMD-College Park monthly smash tournament and went 0-2 in a double elimination bracket after convincing myself I’d at least get 2 wins, maybe even top 16. The talent was sparse, and I had trained a lot, so my efforts would start paying off. At least that is what I thought going into the tournament and how I wrong I was about that. I was also getting beat by my friends who didn’t play the game, but I still kept on playing and training. I had that drive to just get better and keep practicing. To prove that I could be competent at something I was never competent at before: a fighting game.
When the summer time hit, I was (mostly) out of college and had no job. I honestly don’t know what I was doing during all this time with no friends and no job, but all I know is I had a ton of time for smash. I went to every Xanadu weekly. I would go to smash fests. I went to every random tourney I could find within driving distance on facebook or smashboards. It was 3 solid months of smash and some random education stuff on the side.
I then had to go down to NC with my Mom in the fall because I had no where to stay in MD. Have no fear though, I was able to find a smash scene there as well. And while still having no job I kept on the smash grind. One of the first things I did when I got to NC was going to a local player’s smash fest, which ended up being just me and him playing and watching smash videos for a couple hours. By this point I had stopped playing Falco and became a Marth main who could reasonably body lower level players. At the very least I could easily beat my non-smash friends, but I was still looking for the push to the next level. I would go to occasionally scheduled smash fests, weeklies that would come and go, monthlies that I would have to drive 1.5-2 hours to get to. It was a far cry from what I was used to in MD, but the community in NC took the game far less seriously and was overall much more enjoyable to hang out with outside of smashing. They had fun with the game, something I hadn’t truly experienced with Melee until I was in NC. I finished the year still unsure of my IRL future, while continuing to push my Melee future further.
2015
The start of the year for 2015, was the start of everyone’s year, at least if you played smash. January was non-eventful, but Super Bowl weekend for everyone else wasn’t Super Bowl weekend for me. It was Apex 2015 weekend. Now one of the most infamous and somehow famous iterations of the iconic smash series, it had over 2000 melee entrants. It had PPMD, the man who had been on a hiatus for the ending of 2014. It had all 5 of the gods in attendance, plus Leffen who was just starting to make his name as a potential god himself. I didn’t get to go because I didn’t have the money or time to dedicate to going to NJ for a weekend. However, I did get to stay in NC for that weekend and partied with other smashers. I even remember leaving my mom’s Super Bowl Sunday party and telling her I was going to watch the Super Bowl with some of my friends. Not telling her that I was actually going to be playing smash and nothing else the whole time.
With the start of top 8 of Apex and PPMD in the winner’s side, the smashing stopped and the viewing commenced. In case you are not aware, PPMD is from NC. And while I was not, I was in his home state, watching him with his biggest fans–fellow NC smashers–as he destroyed Apex with his Marth and Falco. We were hype, it was past midnight, and I had never felt more connected to a community than I had at that point. Even though it wasn’t what I would call my home state I felt more welcome in NC’s smash community than I ever did in MD’s. There were no clique, no hidden groups that I needed to know about, everyone was upfront and kind, and when given the chance, they decided to invite a scrub who had only been living there for a few months at that point into their viewing party to watch their #1 homey destroy the competition. I felt so connected to that community and it is still my biggest regret that I had to leave it, but I missed my home state too much. I missed MD.
I had been looking for a job for a long time, and finally managed to get on with AFLAC. I went for the “interview,” then for a “second interview,” and finally got the job. Honestly, I think they just accepted anyone with a pulse, because I was definitely not a salesman, but they hired me anyways. I went to smash events, went to work, and was hoping for money to come in because the job was 100% commission. I never made one sale. Shocker from the guy who made no friends in college and played video games non-stop I know. I quit that job after 1 month, if that is even appropriate terminology since I never got a dime from them. I then got a job at Wendy’s and started working there for minimum wage. I know this isn’t smash related, but I think it gives important context as to why I did not sign up for or go to any majors for all of 2015. I didn’t have the money. I barely scraped by to go to the weeklies and monthlies I did go to. I would look to get Saturdays off if I could (they worked me 6 days a week for only 30 hour weeks) since I didn’t have any paid leave time at all. I would write my name on a calendar and hope to get time off. It didn’t always work out. It was during this time that I was pretty much stuck to only going to tournaments I could travel to after work hours or on Sunday. Not much. The year ended with me learning about Pound 2016, a major in my backyard, that I knew I just had to attend.
2016
I started the year pretty fantastically. I had been putting out my resume on places like Indeed and going to job fairs and all that, and I finally got an email from a company that required a college degree for a job opening. I didn’t care that it wasn’t in my original major, I just wanted something, anything, to get out of flipping burgers at Wendy’s 6 days a week with no vacation, dental or medical plans. I got an interview, and in March I learned I was getting the job. It more than doubled my pay rate, going from making $12,870 a year to $37,440 a year. I would be working Monday through Friday. I would have a 9 to 5 job. I wouldn’t have to cover night shifts. I could request time off. I was ecstatic to say the least. During this whole time at Wendy’s I had been going to Xanadu, which starting in 2014, and even in 2015, was having Smash 64 tournaments with Melee. I never bothered to sign up because I was too dedicated to Melee to want to do both on the same night. However, with my new job offer in March, it gave me a new lease on my smash life. I decided to go to the Smash 64 weekly, since they had split the days the two games were running on. 64 was on Monday and Melee was on Wednesday. So I decided it was fairly pain free to test the waters. My thinking was this: if it is terrible, I won’t come back; if it is fine, then what is there to lose. I never considered a third option: what if it was amazing?
I had always felt that the Melee community, especially in MD, left something to be desired. The 64 community was that. When I went to that weekly in March I had every expectation that I would get there and everyone would go their mains, and I would be stuck fighting for scraps among the other scrubs. That was furthest from the truth. Everyone approached me, scrubs and top players alike. Friendlies between top players sometimes involved them not going their main, sometimes they would go their main against me. They approached me, they welcomed me and they let me have fun while having fun themselves. I know this all sounds rather ordinary, but I had been so conditioned to the Melee culture that it was a shock. If two top players were playing they would go their mains, or at least another high tier. If a top player was playing against you, you were lucky to play their main. The only fun you would have with someone is if you did something so crazy it worked, which was almost never, or you pulled off a sick combo. It was a big shock to the system, and it was honestly all I could think about in my lead up to me finally leaving Wendy’s (I had sent my two weeks in prior to going to that weekly). I was going to Pound 2016, which was my first major. Arguably, the thing I should be looking forward to the most, but all I could think about was how normal and welcoming the Smash 64 community made me feel. I had to go back. I had to get better.
So, while I went to Pound 2016 and played Melee (I learned about 64 too late to sign up for it in time), it was the last melee tournament I ever took seriously again. Instead I poured all my time and energy into Smash 64. It didn’t happen overnight, but it slowly started to happen. When both games were on separate days it was easy to just go to both weeklies. Drive to 64 on Monday and Melee on Wednesday. I would go to tournaments that had both games and sign up for both. When the 64 scene moved to Wednesday I had told myself, “I’ll just go to 64 the one week and Melee the next.” That never happened. When I went to multi-game tournaments where they offered both Melee and 64, I started signing up only for 64. I never went back to Melee. I stuck with 64. And while I had one last hooray with Melee at Shine 2016, I never had the drive to be good at Melee again, nor to enter tournaments, even the weeklies. All of that had been shifted to 64. I traveled more than I ever had before. I went to more majors in the last 4 months of 2016 than I ever had when I played Melee. I went to my birth state of IN for Boss Battle 2, Massachusetts for Shine 2016, and the State of Washington for Don’t Park on the Grass. And it wasn’t even for a game that I thought I’d be traveling for. It wasn’t for Melee it was for 64.
2017…
With 2017, the traveling continued. In February I took my first trip to Europe, and it was for Smash. The tournament was Beast 7. A Melee and Sm4sh tournament that had added 64 on the side, and I went only for 64. I got to enjoy Sweden and met so many awesome European smashers that I’m hoping I will get to meet again soon either in the States or back in Europe. I then went to Florida for CEO:Dreamland, which was also a lot fun. I got to go out to CA for SNOSA III, Massachusetts again for Shine 2017, IN for Boss Battle 3, and I plan to go to Texas for Hitstun 3. I’ve replaced controllers, had parties, made friends, and have had one hell of a fun time with 64 so far, and that does not look to be slowing down anytime soon.
Smash is much more than just a game for me. It is a community of players that come together to enjoy a common game which transcends language barriers. It is the only community I know of where I can meet a player from Peru, then move down a seat to play a player from Mexico, then one from Japan, then Brazil, then Germany, etc. I’ve played with so many people from so many different countries and states, and have made friends with those same people. I have traveled the world vicariously through the people I play smash with, and I can’t really trade that for anything, and I think that after only 4 years of playing smash, it is by far and away the most important thing that has happened in my life.