How Did You Find Melee?

[Marmalad3]

Whether you played as a kid or found Melee along the way, I wanna hear your story!

 

[Comatose]

During elementary school, my next door neighbors and I would play while waiting for the bus. The oldest of them was in like 5th grade when I was in 1st, and played mewtwo. Then, I got melee for the Christmas when I was in 2nd grade. Collectively my brothers and I played that for about 1000 hours until brawl came out. Then we started playing that, mainly cuz we loved all the new characters (though I usually stuck to playing marth or link, my melee mains).
Years later, during middle school, I met one of my best friends through brawl. He was a friend of an old friend of mine, and heard through him that I was really good at brawl (I was horrible, but could space better than him, and all of my friends at the time, so I appeared good). We played out a few games, and I ended up barely losing out. From there we basically had a rivalry, which spanned many years.
Eventually, this rivalry resurfaced while hanging out with 3 other friends pulling an all nighter. It was about 1am, and we were reminiscing of the past, when we started talking about brawl because my friend noticed the wii under my other friends tv. We played it out, quite horribly, and soon everyone joined in and was having a great time.
That became our favorite thing to do whenever we hung out. One of my friends, however, went deeper into it and began watching combo videos and tutorials and the like, and came to the realization of how much advanced stuff is in melee. He challenged us to melee, and obviously won convincingly over most of us (except me, since marth fsmash spam destroys scrubs).
Over time we all started to get more competitive, seeking to outdo each other in melee alone, no more brawl. Finally, most of us are now going to tournaments and getting involved in our local smash scene (and currently are thinking of setting up a crew battle to commemorate the last year of high school, basically our crew taking on any challenging crew from another year).

 

[EPsilon933]

I once rented Melee back in December 2001 / January 2002 and got as far as unlocking Marth. Played 1 session of adventure mode as him and then had to return the game

2 years later, I bought the game

Late 2006 - mid 2007, a friend and I in high school played this game against each other all the time. We started out with explosives only on very low, and shortly after converted to playing with tournament rules. I used to watch combo videos all the time but he didn't have the same level of dedication as I did. When his family moved, I had no one else to play so I ended up playing CSS, Halo 1, and Halo 2 on PC for a while. I didn't even try to look online for a tournament scene near my area because I didn't even have a learner's permit. Nor did I even try to get one

On October or November 2009, the greatest thing that could ever happen to me happened. In high school, I had this wicked cool teacher that would host end of the quarter parties for his classes if the class average grades were good. There would be games, sodas, and pizzas. I brought my Wii with Brawl and set it up in the morning for his other classes to use. When I returned there during lunch, Melee was in it instead. We held a tournament mode tournament of 8 entrants and I won. It felt so good playing that game with a crowd watching me

In December 2009, I noticed a friend of mine on facebook was attending an event called MAGFest. I clicked the page and noticed it was featuring a Melee tournament. So I went there and got wrecked by competitive players. Even back then, I wanted to record playing this game and a lot of my 1st few videos were from that event. Most were bad and only 1 thing from that event stayed on my channel. I was too nervous to ask to record the Melee tournament and it took me until the Brawl tournament to have the guts to ask. There were also 3 other random moments I uploaded but the comments on them were pretty harsh

As time passed, I hung out a few times with the students who swapped out the games on my Wii which encouraged me to take Melee more seriously. Somehow I met up with ephoenix, who's friends with Boss, who gave me a deeper intro to the competitive Melee scene. 1 day he told me about a tournament he might be going to (but didn't), and I find out it was only 7.6 miles from where I lived. I biked there because I still didn't have a driver's license and wouldn't have one for another 1.5 years. I've been going to almost every one of those tournaments I could go to ever since. 1 time I even biked home through the rain. Great times

 

[Ezzee]

I've been playing this game since preschool. I stopped for a little while to play brawl, but we enjoyed melee more because brawl just felt like something is missing. So I've basically been playing melee non stop for the last 11 years of my life ("melee is much harder for casuals." You lied Sakurai.) I recently got into competitive and it's been pretty fun getting 5x better in the span of 3 months than I ever was in the last 11 years

 

[Kadano]

On October or November 2009, the greatest thing that could ever happen to me happened. In high school, I had this wicked cool teacher that would host end of the quarter parties for his classes if the class average grades were good. There would be games, sodas, and pizzas. I brought my Wii with Brawl and set it up in the morning for his other classes to use. When I returned there during lunch, Melee was in it instead. We held a tournament mode tournament of 8 entrants and I won. It felt so good playing that game with a crowd watching me

Confirmed for world’s most awesome teacher.
Were did he host those parties?

 

[EPsilon933]

Confirmed for world’s most awesome teacher.
Were did he host those parties?

In his classroom

 

[EpixAura]

I started playing a couple of years after the game was released. In a pawn shop, my younger brother bought a guide for it (despite us not having the game and not knowing what it was) for $0.25. It looked so interesting that we eventually found the game and bought it immediately. We were just kids back then, so all we did was spam and camp, but it was fun, and we eventually managed to unlock all the characters and stages (Event match 51 had me frustrated to tears, though).
Eventually we stopped playing and would only play when we had friends over who also played the game, which very rarely happened. I bought Brawl on the day of its release, and after a year or so of playing, started to become slightly aware of the competitive side. After 2 years or so, I eventually dropped Brawl to pick Melee back up. Unfortunately, now that I'm in college I'm back to playing mostly Brawl again since everyone admitted they don't have the balls for Melee (I don't really either, though. I still can't consistently waveshine with Falco).

 

[milligraham]

I vaguely remember my first experience with melee. It was maybe 2002 (give or take a year) at a sleep over. My friend had melee and everyone would take turns fighting the master hand. During this time I don't believe I even knew the name of the game. Later in probably 2004 i rented it and later bought it because i enjoyed it so much. I played casually on and off for years, during that time I switched to brawl for a while, went back to melee eventually, and in the past year become increasingly more interested in the competitive aspect.

 

[JKJ]

I have been playing Melee since I can remember. Literally, I've played it since the age of 5, and I don't remember a time without it in my life
~1 1/2 years ago, my brother (whom I had had a a longstanding melee rivalry with) informed me that a friend at his college was way better than him and knew how to wavedash. I looked up wavedashing, and that opened a sort of Pandora's box, and I have just been playing and improving nonstop since.

 

[EddyBearr]

I played Smash 64.

 

[Bones0]

I was too nervous to ask to record the Melee tournament and it took me until the Brawl tournament to have the guts to ask.

Well we're all glad you eventually got up the courage to start recording. A wise man once told me: "It takes guts to be amazing."


I used to spend weekdays over at a friend's house during the summer while my parents were at work, and he had an N64 so we played a bunch of those games. The main ones I remember were Tony Hawk and, of course, Smash 64. I fell in love with Smash immediately because it was just so awesome. Crazy things are always happening, whether you're playing with all items on a crazy stage or no items, Fox only, FD. After a couple years, Melee came out and my best friend at the time got it. We played for hours and hours all the time and never really took it seriously. My friend introduced me to GameFAQs sometime in '05, and I naturally looked up Melee's board as it had been my favorite game for years (not sure how often we still played it since we played other games too). I found SmashBoards from the GameFAQs board and started learning about advanced Melee. I read about all the techniques and read the guides for all of the characters I played (keep in mind I legit played 15 characters consistently at the time lol). The character I originally recall considering my "main" was Ness, but I also recall periods of considering Mario, Kirby, Marth, Falco, and a lot of other characters my "best character".

I don't remember exactly when I started dedicating myself to Falco and Marth, but I remember being inspired a lot by Ken and Bombsoldier. Unfortunately, like many others, I was plagued by the problem of having no one to play with. My best friend didn't really feel like learning advanced techniques and we didn't play Melee much anymore, but when I got bored I would love to sit down and just practice vs. computers, dreaming one day I could combo like Bombsoldier and PC Chris and defeat Ken in a Grand Finals set at MLG. Alas, after searching for Smashers near me, I came to the conclusion that no one lived nearby. Too young to drive, it became sort of the bane of my existence. The heart of MD/VA's Melee scene is about 2 hours from me, and even the Smashers closest to be are about an hour away. I remember copying and pasting every Maryland and Pennsylvania Smasher's location into Google Maps to see how far from me. This was not a one time thing, it was basically an obsession. I NEEDED someone nearby to play with, but no one ever was. This is, sadly, a habit I still maintain today. I think I have probably checked the distance to every SmashBoards user with an MD or PA town as his location. With no real hope of getting to practice with people, I moved towards competing in Nintendo DS games and Halo 2. I got quite good at both Mario Kart and especially Metroid Prime: Hunters for the DS, and though I never got very good at Halo 2, it was one of my favorite games I've ever played and still miss playing it online dearly today. I watched it alongside Melee in the old MLG days thinking I'd missed out on my opportunity to ever enjoy either game. I watched Melee combo videos obsessively, but once Halo 3 had come out I had pretty much stopped practicing Melee. It became too depressing to practice without ever getting to play.

Fast forward to 2009, I graduated high school and was attending Virginia Tech. Being an avid H3 player, I naturally looked up to see if there were any Halo festivities going on hoping to compete in some tournaments. Recalling the MLG days of Halo and Melee, I decided to also look for Melee. Little did I know that there was a decent (by my standards, ridiculously incredible) scene of Melee players on and around campus. There were great players such as Redd, Knight Praetor, Fox Lisk (SSBPD guy), and the best player in the world at the time, Mahone. I played all of them and the feeling of getting destroyed by people was euphoric. I couldn't stop smiling any time I was playing with them, and I started watching Melee vids again. At first I just watched some random combo videos, but when I started catching up with what was happening in the tournament scene, I was pretty surprised and impressed. Some kid named after a fruit had took the crown of best Melee player from Mew2King. This is a joke, right? But if there's one thing about Melee vids, it's that they don't lie. You can tell immediately how legit someone is in this game when you watch even a 5 second clip of them, so to see how good people had gotten only gave me more drive to improve.

Returning home after the semester ended, I FINALLY found someone who wanted to improve in Melee as badly as I do. He had driven 2 hours to the main tournament location in our region with his friend, and not long after, another friend of his saw me on SmashBoards and we all met up to play. Not knowing how good he was, we played on a huge projector in the middle of a community college room, and it was awesome. I was solidly better than him, but he wasn't awful and had the attitude of someone who would improve and challenge me to do the same. We used to play in our school's library in the study rooms with TVs, and we even got kicked out once for being too loud. We weren't talking at all, so I think it was actually our controllers that were making too much noise, which was a thought that had made me think about how much we must have improved. Though it's also possible that lady was just being a *****. We played for so many hours in the library it's kind of ridiculous how much time we spent, but none of it ever felt wasted as we both continued to improve as well have a great time exploring and experiencing Melee.

I think it's been almost 3 years since we first met, and I sit here typing this very post after just getting back from his house where we played Melee for 10 hours straight. Our drive and enjoyment towards the game continues to amaze me only slightly less than the amazement I hold towards this game and the community that drives it. Or perhaps, just maybe, Melee is the one responsible for driving this community. When I see how far I've come, how far every fan of competitive Melee has come, it's hard to think we could have have walked the path with any other game.

 

[Frame Perfect]

it was either smash or trying to understand dragonball z on Telemundo cuz my parents wouldn't get me cable. no regrets

 

[EPsilon933]

Well we're all glad you eventually got up the courage to start recording. A wise man once told me: "It takes guts to be amazing."

Our drive and enjoyment towards the game continues to amaze me only slightly less than the amazement I hold towards this game and the community that drives it. Or perhaps, just maybe, Melee is the one responsible for driving this community. When I see how far I've come, how far every fan of competitive Melee has come, it's hard to think we could have have walked the path with any other game.

It's a great game, isn't it? There's perhaps far more flexibility in this than most other fighting games out there. So rarely are 2 hits ever the same. Differences in DI and damage influence that. Ever time you play this game, you see something new

 

[standardtoaster]

tbh i don't know when i found melee or how i started playing it. all i know is that i now have 4 cubes and 3 discs and attend tourneys when i can

 

[MattDotZeb]

I discovered Melee because of Smash64 of course. Though how I got into competitive Melee is different, and that's what I'll say.

My friend and I (Those in the speedrunning community might know him, AndrewG) often played a variety of games together including Melee. It was at the point where we'd place 5+ GC disks upside down, shuffle them, and play the one we picked at random. Smash became a game we decidedly played more than others, and got "really good at."

We weren't really good, actually. (Wow!) Though we didn't know this until googling Super Smash Bros Tournament in August 2005, finding gamefaqs melee board, and then attending a smashfest 1wk after finding out what the heck a wavedash is. We got destroyed, and decided to figure out how to beat these players.

We started out equal, but eventually he didn't play as much as I, mostly because he didn't have a reliable setup or something - I don't really remember, and went on to do amazing things in speedrunning while I went on to forward smash my way through 8 years of SSBM with Falco.

<3

 

[KrIsP!]

Internet wasn't as big of a deal back then, we all used it but I didn't check for videogame news or even know melee was ever announced. **** my pants when I walked into my local game store and they had an entire shelf of melee as it was released that month. Best surprise ever.

Ride home was so intense, really wanted to try the sequel to smash. This can be proven by the ripped plastic on my game case, its cut in half be ause I couldn't open the plastic packaging and just tore through everything with a knife. Was with a friend of mine, she didn't care much for games but since it was the Mario kart of fighting games I had someone to play with for awhile until I got into it more with another friend of mine. After awhile we stopped using items, started using characters we felt were better (sheik, Marth, falco...didn't know about tiers though) he introduced me to tournaments, brought me to one in 2007, sad to say I was to embarrassed to ask my parents to bring to more and my friend lived really far away while the tournaments were even farther. So though I enjoyed competitive smash I didn't get into it until after highschool when I started driving.

I still have that copy of melee with the torn packaging, its nostalgic to me.

 

[stickmantankguy]

I played smash 64 up until melee came out.
Although I'm a little bit older than Smash 64, I've been playing smash for as far back as I can remember (I can't remember stuff from when I was ****ing 2).
Although that whole competitive scene thing is relatively new to me, and I've only recently started going to tournaments. My first tournament was actually this past Smashacre back in August.
http://www.smashboards.com/threads/smashacre-gluttony-results-all-results-up.339897/
I went under the name 'Guy' in Melee Singles. Aren't I creative. I also did doubles with my bro and ended up against M2K and Cactuar (It was fun, we took one stock from M2K in the whole set because we made him laugh too hard :D). I think I did pretty well for my first tournament. I probably just got lucky with the people I was put up against, it's not that they weren't good, it's just that I got put up against another Samus, and a Marth (My most comfortable high tier matchup). Although let's not forget the Falcon that destroyed me and the Jigglypuff that I almost got. Thank god I live right by where Apex is held, so I'll be there doing friendlies and working up my Samus and my Ness (ambition yay).
So yeah, I played smash 64 until melee came out, but I sucked anyways so I might as well have started playing the game a couple years ago.

 

[iffy525]

It fell from the heavens on to my lap

 

[Frame Perfect]

It fell from the heavens on to my lap

directly from its creator

...and on the 7th day He...

 

[Bones0]

directly from its creator

...and on the 7th day He...

On the 7th frame he L-cancelled.

 

[Frame Perfect]

only He can get the ground frame