Aprox

Just starting out my melee antics. I was adopted at the age of 1 so I grew up with siblings that were all 16-20 years older than me. Smash was a new game but being only 5 or 6 when it came out, I missed the chance to be a part of the hype form day one. I spend countless hours playing against bots by myself because my brothers and sister moved out fairly soon after I was adopted (college and family goals), leaving me a pseudo only-child. I never got passed a casual skill level because I was content to hit bots with basic attacks and I could usually overpower even level 9 bots with sheer aggression. I did, however, develop a love for Falco. His jump height and moves looked so cool and his attacks destroyed bots easily. I always wished I could play as Falco instead of Fox in Star Fox 64. Eventually I found other games and melee lay forgotten. With all the characters unlocked, all the events done, all the trophies collected, and still no friends nearly as interested in the game as I was, I assumed that every ounce of had been squeezed from my 10 years with the game.

How wrong I was.

About 4 and a half years ago I went on a band trip with my friend Josh, He just so happened to bring his GameCube and melee. We started it up in the hotel room the night before our performance and he soundly destroyed me with Marth. Granted, it had been a while since I played at all and even longer since playing against a human opponent. After we got back home about 2 days later I got online and decided to see if I could find the best melee player in the world. I expected some old archived videos on YouTube with bad quality showing decent players hashing it out with friends. I DID NOT expect to find and up-to-date, fully functioning professional scene with hundreds of recent videos and discoveries. Already my mind was blown. I watched sets at random one after the other. Gameplay faster than I could think! Hype greater than I could imagine! Passion deeper than I could fathom! Were in not for the chaos of my personal life, I believe I would have started my journey much sooner. It was 2 years later before I found the Smash Brothers Documentary.....

Never before have I felt such an ache for a time long gone. I felt compassion, hatred, respect, admiration, fear, suspicion, and fondness for people I had never met; mere pixels on a screen. I watched as legends were made and legacies were cemented. I saw techniques taken to their utmost efficiency.

Imagine you spend 10 years growing up with one of your best friends only to have him pass away. Very few people attend the funeral and you are forced to move on with your life after putting a piece of your heart in the grave. But then your friend returns, more alive than you thought possible. Not only that, your friend has countless tales to tell, each one more gripping than the last. You feel overwhelming joy, yet a strange remorse that you missed the excitement because the truth was hidden all this time. This is what I felt at the end of the documentary. I couldn't believe one of my all time favorite games was taken this seriously. But I also couldn't believe how much I had missed, how behind I was. To be fair, my age was a major factor in my ignorance but it still hurt knowing that while I sat in my room alone with 99 stocks and a single Bowser CPU, some of the greatest melee minds were hard at working building a community like no other.

I'd say that this regret was the main thing holding me back from picking up melee right then and there. Everyone seemed so far ahead. The history had been made and the Gods were well established. Everything I came to realize had been realized 10 times over by my predecessors. There was no point.

I continued to watch the scene from afar. But the urge to play was growing inside me. Constant mental battles wondering if it was worth my time. "I'll never be THAT good so why bother." "I don't have the time for this!" "But maybe I'm secretly a genius at melee..." "No, I'd have to train every day for a decade to learn these moves. 100% impossible...."

This has been my struggle to this day. I recently watched an episode of Last Stock Legends covering the work of Bach and his archival videos. Why this particular episode pushed me over the edge is a bit hard to say. I think it was the overwhelming humanity found in the interviews and the old footage. It's true that for the to players, melee is fused with their life like no other game, but it isn't all about the money or the fame. It's about feeling that freedom of choice in every move and combo. It's about making stories even if they only matter to yourself. It's about finding that new form of expression and using it to touch the lives of those around you. It's about taking every loss and adding it to the bonfire that fuels the next win. Sometimes it even seems to be about the struggle that is life.

Words can't describe the potential this game has, or what it has come to mean to me. But then again you don't use your mouth to play smash do you? It's a battle of hands and minds. And you know what? I think the final battle in classic and adventure mode just made a whole lot more sense to me.