The saga of Red Marth is far more epic than the little teaser of an explanation Gum gave. That **** was unreal. I won't say names either, but I shall shed some light on this legend.
This was at a large tournament in North Carolina last summer. 70-80 attendants including a ton of out-of-state kids, Gum and myself included. It was a multi-day event. The first night was friendlies, which means everyone stayed up the whole time. The next day was the tournament [teams/singles] and after singles was over, everyone continued playing.
Around 3 or 4 AM Sunday morning, people were still playing and then the focus switched to teams friendlies. Two of the top placers were on the TV for a while since no one was beating them. They didn't need to try very hard as most of the teams they played against were far inferior to their pro-level skills. There was a small group of people still awake just watching this happen...at some point, it was just one team trying to face these nonchalant monsters. Try as they might, nothing worked. No matches were close, but they weren't outright slaughters either, so hope still remained for these struggling players...
It should be noted that 3 out of the 4 people in these team matches enjoy talking ****............a lot. But it's the competitive kind. The kind that adds some heat to the battles. The 3 people included the two dominating forces and one from the weaker pair. The two veterans thought that they could at least find a worthy adversary in the art of talking **** and starting giving twice as good as they were getting.
The verbal massacre that commenced match after match inspired from the loser the wittiest of retorts including, but not limited to, "how many d.cks does your mom have?"
but that's okay. **** talking is part of competition, like I said. but it never gets personal. This genius decides to go against that and makes a direct shot at a physical attribute of one of his opponents....and his partner, a fantastic Yoshi player, just shook his head in silent embarrassment. By now it's 6 AM and the other players realized "oh!...so that's how it's going to be" and decided to up the ante: they actually started TRYING.
after half a dozen team-7stocks and 8stocks happened [against all of the offender's various characters], he decides to choose Marth [and they were on the red team]. The guy he insulted declares, mid match, "dude, this Yoshi is ****ing sweet!...but Red Marth? yeah, Red Marth is ****ing garbage. **** Red Marth." After this moment, he was never referred to as anything other than Red Marth. No matter what character he chose [the first match after Red Marth was born is what Gum was referring to...with taking forever to choose his next character....mostly because they kept egging him on and repeatedly told Red Marth to choose his character. They even went so far as to loudly pick apart his character-specific strategies every time he chose someone............eventually he settled on Red Marth again]
The **** and the **** talking gets out of hand, as does the abuse of this player's unauthorized new Smash name...
And that's when he mumbled something that sent a chill down the spines of anyone within earshot. That is...if he said what we thought he said.
"If you don't shut the **** up I'm going to jump over my teammate and choke you with my *inaudible* cord" [though it was probably "controller cord" it sounded like he said "choke cord"].....the match continued in awkward silence. This was specifically directed at the partner of the person Red Marth insulted. You can tell he's aching to respond....and finally decides to let out some famous last words...
"What the ****'s a choke cord?"
IMMEDIATELY Red Marth rips out his controller cord, doubles it over, leaps over his teammate and proceeds to strangle the guy for a brief moment. A firm hand on his chest from the victim snaps him out of his blinding white rage and he releases the pressure of the cord. Meanwhile everyone who just witnessed this is frozen in silence and mental fighter stance. So many thoughts are filling the silence and I'm pretty sure most of us were thinking some of the same things:
"is this **** really happening??"
"is something about to go down?!........and if it does.....who the **** is going to have Red Marth's back???"
Realizing he just violently assaulted someone over, ultimately, a video game, Red Marth stands up...........................plugs his controller in, while looking directly in the eyes of the other team, sits back down...and continues to play the match out.
Needless to say, everyone stopped playing after that.
After some time and much discussion/shared shock with the victim and his teammate...hideously brilliant plans for revenge were hatched but eventually only took two forms:
1) I got the tourney hosts to change the guy's name in the results post to Red Marth
2) the victim, a pro among pros, pulled some strings [or at least someone did on his behalf] and Red Marth's SWF name actually got CHANGED to RED MARF.
And that is the epic tale of Red Marth.
Not so much in Smash 64 or Melee, but in Brawl it's awesome.
