In 1998, my mom would take us to Hollywood Video every week to rent a game. I fell in love with smash 64 and used to play it with my brother constantly. We would have 50 stock matches with 2 level 9s, all items on. For 3 months straight we rented it every week, and then my mom finally caved and just bought it realizing it would save her money in the long run
We played it for a while, and I started hearing about Melee coming out and got very excited. I begged my mom for a gamecube and unfortunately never got one.
There were a few times between 2001 and 2004 that I was able to play Melee at my cousins house, but they were mainly interested in Halo (they owned both systems) so I never got to play for long.
In 2005 I was a freshman in high school and I met these kids Travis and Derrek. We started hanging out quite a bit and the first time I went to Travis' house, and saw that he had a GC. The first thing I asked was if he had Melee, and he said that was all that they played. I started telling him about how I was amazing as Smash 64, and they both kind of scoffed at me saying there was no way I could beat them. I was a bit taken aback, how could they be so sure of themselves that they could beat me in this party game?
Boy was I wrong. They were far better then I. Granted, their knowledge of the game was very basic compared to what we all know today, they didn't wd, L cancel, etc. They just knew how to space, how to spot dodge proficiently, etc. I was astounded. I wanted to learn. Could this game that I have always yearned to own have a competitive nature to it?
So I practiced. For the next 2 years I played with them at least two days a week. We started learning about advanced techniques, practicing them often.
We heard about a tournament that was happening in our local mall, and practiced even harder. I eventually surpassed Derrek, and Travis and I have been very even ever since, learning at generally the same pace. We all went to it, and we all did fairly well, but were completely destroyed by "Haiyoto" (who I think said he was on this board but idr what his name was, his tag at the tournament was "Kirby"
) and his brother who I remember dominating me with Link ._.
We kept playing inside our own clique, never really traveling to tournaments. Just kept improving in any way we could.
When Brawl came out, we were all very disappointed with it. We went back to Melee and were hoping that other people would to.
Eventually through a mutual friend, we met Tichinde who is a very good player who happened to live around the block from us, and he came to see how good we were. When we met his expectations, he introduced us to ZoSo, and we have all become really solid friends.
We went to RoM 2 and had an amazing time.
I continue to improve to this day, after nearly 7 years of playing. I feel that my improvement was extremely slow due to lack of tournament experience, but I think I'm finally coming into my own as a very solid player. And I've made a lot of new friends, and been going to a lot more smashfests recently.
I didn't expect this post to be so long.