How you got into competitive Melee

[Spak]

Hello! I've been around here for about 3/4 of a year (with frequent posting for the past half-year or so) and have seen quite a few people join, so I was just wondering: how did everyone get into competitive Smash?

I guess if I'm asking for stories, it's only fair I give you mine. I'll spoiler it in case you don't want to kill your finger while scrolling down the page or in case you just don't care about me.

Spoiler

My Smash story all began when I was about 6. In 2003, I unwrapped my brand new copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee to much confusion. At that point in time, I only had a PS2, GBC, and GBA. Since those were the consoles I had, I figured someone bought me a game for the wrong console until I opened my GameCube about a minute later. I played Melee like crazy ever since I opened it and have never stopped. Right out of the box, I decided that my main was going to be Pikachu (Pokemon Yellow and Silver were two of my favorite games at the time) and I was gonna be the best Pikachu in the world.

Fast-forward about a month and I had unlocked all of the characters, including a red-haired swordsman named Roy. Because my hair is red, Roy looked cool, and the people across the street said he was the best character in the game (I didn't pick up on the fact they were joking until years later), I naturally switched to Roy as my main.

Then, in early 2008, I ran into a significant problem. I had gone on Smash Bros Dojo! every day to get updates on Brawl, hoping that Roy would somehow work his way into the game. I was disappointed to find that after the last character for the roster was named, Roy was nowhere to be found. Because of this, I deduced that I would need to switch mains completely in order to practice for Brawl. This was when I switched over to Falco because I had played Star Fox 64 and loved the blue bird's sarcastic tone. This was also the time I learned about basic techniques like L-Cancelling, Wavedashing, etc. Unfortunately, I never actually used these in play as I didn't need them to beat my friends.

For the next 2 years, I played Brawl pretty often but never stopped playing Melee. Brawl just felt slow and unresponsive compared to Melee, even at a casual level. In 2011, I started talking to one of my friends at school about Melee. Her brother @ RaphaelRobo plays Melee competitively and knowing I was the best in my friend group (by far), I said that I might be able to beat him.

Freshman year in High School (2012-13) is when I started to get into competitive Melee. I knew and had read about the Gannondorf vs Falco matchup, had been practicing and 4-stocking level 9 CPUs, and was ready to fight when he came home from college. When he came downstairs, he hadn't played in a couple months, so I thought it was gonna be an easy fight (even though he knew how to use and implement Wavelanding, L-Canceling, Dashdancing, etc.)...

I got 3-Stocked.

I sat there shocked, taking in the fact that I wasn't the best in the world. I didn't know what a set was at the time, so I just shook his hand and said "Good game". After this occurred, he brought me and one of my friends upstairs (at the time, my friend mained Kirby in Brawl and didn't have Melee) and showed us PM 2.5. While my friend was groveling over the fact Kirby wasn't in the game, I was astounded that people made Brawl feel like I thought it should have in the first place.

After this whole event, I went home and practiced like crazy. I wanted to get better at this game. I couldn't believe that a game I had played and loved for the past 9 years could be so fluid and complex without me even knowing about it. About half a year later, a sax in our marching band (maining Mario) decided to challenge me to Melee, stating that he was superior. I went over to his house and he had a beautiful home theater.

The only problem was the video was run through a bunch of boxes, it was being projected, and I was using a Wavebird. The match was a rollfest because I couldn't do any tech with that lag, in addition to the fact that while I could do all of the tech in training mode, it didn't translate to an actual match because I didn't have anyone good to play against that I knew. He won by one stock, stated that he was the supreme ruler of Melee, and then I challenged him to come over to my house (I've always had a CRT that I've gamed on.) He accepted and then lost.

This starts the period where me, the Kirby main (who switched to Marth as soon as we started getting serious), the sax player (switched to Luigi, then Marth, and is now a Fox main), and another friend (started out with Ganondorf, then went Falcon, then went Fox) started getting serious about the game. We also figured out that three other players that were in our marching band (a Marth/Shiek main, a Shiek main, and a Roy/Pichu/Falco-When-He-Needs-To-Be-Serious main) were better than us and this started the group of friends I'm currently in.

To speed along the process, significant events were a Melee and Project M crew battle between Apex and Holly Springs (we had to add a person who only played PM and a person with little Smash experience because they wanted 7 people, so we lost) and we all got much better in general by fighting each-other frequently.

Then, on September 13th, 2014, I went to my first tournament. The whole group went (plus one of the Shiek main's friends and another senior from our Marching Band) and we were all pumped. We all ended up losing early, but we had a good time, played lots of friendlies, and learned a lot. Two months later, I decided to change mains to Falcon and have rarely looked back.

Now, for the slitghtly tragic part. Because our weekly (Stuff N' Such) is on Sundays and I go to both morning and evening services, I can't ever enter the tournament because I'm not ever sure it will be over before 5:30. I will eventually make it to a Stuff N' Such, but I'm not quite sure when or how. Probably when I get my own car...

Now that I've spent 45 minutes writing out what brought me to competitive Melee, I want to hear how everyone else got where they are today.

 

[AirFair]

Well I guess I'll spoiler mine too.

Spoiler

I have an older brother. He had an N64 with Smash 64 on it and I started to play it with him when I was 3. Later on in 2004, when I was 5, my brother and I got a gamecube and Melee. I picked up Ness at the time and my brother is a proficient Samus main to this day (even with no knowledge of advanced techniques). We loved that game, and played it till 2007 when he graduated high school and left home. the 8 year old me didn't really want to play by myself so I ended up shelving melee for the time being.

Brawl comes around and I buy it and play it a lot. I beat all my friends at it, so naturally they stopped wanting to play any 1v1's after awhile. We still had some great FFA's, and I will treasure memories of some of our "tournaments" that we held back then. I also became very good with Ness in Brawl. I later started playing Falco because of a chaingrab trick I learned from watching brawl on youtube. That was the first and last time I ever touched compettive brawl, because I didn't know what it was.

I had a lot of fun with Brawl, but I eventually stopped playing it a bunch too. I had beaten all my friends, and my brother would occasionally come home and I would beat him too. It wasn't all that fun anymore. I liked melee a lot more when I looked back on it.

Last summer, basically before 10th grade, I was on YouTube, when on the recommended section, this video shows up called "The Smash Brothers Episode 1: Show Me Your Moves." I was intrigued, so I clicked on it, and fell in love with the documentary. It opened up my eyes to advanced melee, so I started practicing right away. On our LCD TV. Yeah. Although I did join this site the very next day, and began to soak up Smash history and media (followed all the big name streams, subscribed to channels, etc.)

We took a vacation to Ontario that July, and two of my cousins are really good at melee, so I thought I would challenge them. I did, and I had no idea that they knew the advanced techniques. I was beaten by their Fox/Falco. They told me that they had wanted to play in tournaments back in 2005, but they never did. I didn't want to be like that, so when I got home, I joined my regional facebook group and the search for a tournament was on.

On October 24th, 2014, I took one of my friends(a new Sheik main) down to our first tournament (a weekly). My dad had to drive an hour for it. We played a lot of friendlies, and got bodied in the tournament, but it was fun. However, it was too far away. So I found one that was closer and in a better part of town. I started to go over there on some Saturdays and get some practice with the people there, and I started to improve, which made me keep playing (by then I had a CRT so the TV issues were negligible.)

On December 27th, 2014, I got my first tournament win. As in I won a Bo3 set. I ended up spiking this Sheik with Marth, and 2 stocking him game 3. I was so pumped.

Currently I am training to be the best Marth in Houston. Let's see how that goes.

not as long as OP's but I think it's worth a read lol

 

[EPsilon933]

[collapse="prepare for a story"]10/31/2008 - 3/4/2009

The exact date might have been October 31, 2008. It was the end of my 1st quarter of my senior year in high school. I had this really cool network administration teacher who would hold end of the quarter parties where students could bring in all kinds of video games and snacks for all of his classes if the class average was good and if the higher ups in staff would let him get away with it. On that morning, I brought my Wii and Super Smash Brothers Brawl disk to set it up for all the morning classes before mine. When I returned during lunch, Melee was being played

A student from 1 of his previous classes brought his copy of the game and swapped out my initially set game. Without a thought about it, I simply jumped in and join. Soon a 1v1 single elimination tournament of 8 players happened using the game’s tournament mode. In winners semis, I fought against a classmate who surprised me a little. He was the only other student in my class who respected my favorite game at all, even to the point of liking it on his own. My final opponent was the guy who brought the game and ended up being an easier fight than my previous opponent. I guess by technicality we could call this my 1st tournament and my 1st tournament win. A few days later, I told a bit of a friend, ephoenix, about the tournament hosted that day. He kind of complained that he should have known and gone. He was so convinced he would have won, even beating me

Some how we never got together for a gaming session for a while. A few weeks later, a friend of mine told me about a Brawl tournament a Mason group or whatever it was hosted. I went there and placed 2nd. Playing to win was fun even if it was Brawl, for me at the time. Having a bit of a crowd root for me felt awesome. But I got destroyed in Winners and Grand finals, 0-6. The guy who beat me was more dedicated to smash than I was. We both knew of the actual tournament scene for this game. He just knew much more about technique than I did. He implied that he could wavedash in Melee when we briefly talked about the game after the event. I couldn’t do it

Then in December I noticed a friend of mine on Facebook was attending a gaming convention called MAGFest. The event description Mentioned it was holding a Melee tournament which immediately claimed all of my interest. I told my parents about it and they accepted my request to drive me there for the 4 days. When I got there, I got destroyed. This was my 1st encounter with the real competitive players. I’ve never been to a real tournament before because I never bothered to learn how to drive. There was nowhere I ever needed to go. I didn’t even bother learning where to find tournaments. After losing too much to a few of the legit players, I eventually found a group of noobs to free-for-all with

Almost as soon as we got together, I brought out my laptop and capture card to record ourselves. Odd that a noob would have something like this. A few funny moments happened among us that I saved and would eventually upload to youtube. Sadly, I deleted 3 of them months later due to poor ratings and not so approving comments. Only 1 moment survived

On the 2nd day, the Melee tournament began. It was a legitly run tournamen. Good tournaments pretty much never happen at conventions due to the event runners everyone-has-fun philosophy. We were lucky enough to have a Brawl TO (Tournament Organizer), Tantalus, run the event. It was everything a competitive gamer could want; double elimination, seeding, and a plethora of setups. I hooked up my recording gear to 1 of them to put stuff on youtube. But I never told anyone about it. This was my 1st tournament. I was too shy to tell anyone. All I did was hope they would play on it. That didn’t happen so well

When I played in the event, I got wrecked. Unless this is a falsely reconstructed memory, 1 of my opponents was SypherPhoenix. He made me think Fox’s uthrow > uair combo was the most broken thing in the game. I was laughably bad at the game anyways. I recorded a few more games of myself playing and days later I posted them on youtube for others to critique. I got told just how atrocious I was and months later I deleted those too. But I did get the most influential advice I’ve ever been given from the most active critiquer; “You need to play more”

On the 3rd day, the Brawl tournament happened. This time I had the guts to talk. Everything ran flawlessly. Tantalus coordinated tournament sets with me to get the good games on my setups. But that day was also an important day for that Mason group thing that friend of mine invited me to. I had to leave halfway through the event for some kind of ceremony. I never returned to them since

Months later, the friendlies to critique and the Brawl tournament videos were also deleted from my channel. To those of you who know me, you can see the blatant little foreshadowing of my back then future behavior

Some time in the middle of January, I was invited to Cory’s house. He was the friend of that friend who swapped in Melee at the video gaming party. Unlike at MAGFest, this was the 1st time I ever got to play Melee nonstop for what I remember was 8 hours. I even had a blister for my 1st time from gaming so much. We learned a lot from each other. We even joked that we traded characters that day. He converted from Fox to Marth and I mostly converted from Falco to Fox. Marth was among my next best characters, just to clarify. This was also the day when I started learning how to wavedash in an actual game

Halfway through, I got a call from ephoenix, the guy who claimed he could have won against me at that tournament at school. We arranged for a day to play together within a week. I tried texting him and facebook messaging him to let him know I would be leaving fopr his house but he never responded. Socially awkwardly, I went ahead and biked there and rudely awoke him. But we played anyways. Predictably, I got destroyed. No character I played could take off more than 2 stocks from him during the 1st few hours. But as players play each other often, they eventually adapt to each other and even out. He still remained better than me for a long time

A few sessions later, he invited Boss, 1 of the worlds best Doctor Mario players, to his house. Yet again I got wrecked, but worse. It was merciless brutality. It’s easy to think you can fight well against someone when you watch them play. But when you play against them, you have no control over yourself and when you’re losing that hard, you’ll have no idea why. The reason why opponents seem easier when you watch them is I think because of hindsight bias. You imagine you could have foreseen the correct choices and chances of errors so easily. Watching players doesn’t demand quick thinking and reacting. Players don’t have frames of room for error like spectators do and humans make errors all the time

Somehow I beat 1 of his unserious characters, Donkey Kong. I guess that was a victory. The next day at school, word of me playing against him got out to fellow students in my network administration class. I guess it was simply because of a network of friends. Those guys however weren’t anything like friends to me. At the end of every class, our cool teacher would reward us with 5 minutes of Smash64 for keeping the class average good. I’ve always requested for items to be taken off when we play and they retaliated with insults. I’ve also talked about Melee being the best in the series and they replied inthe exact same way. In my response, I made a combo video. I made It Takes Guts to be AMAZING

The only thing I did was Facebook message 1 of them asking them to watch it and he replied with a generic message basically saying “that’s cool”. I don’t think any of them ever legitimately saw the video. Their viewership doesn’t even matter and so briefly had it ever mattered at all. I like to credit that video for making me part of what I am today; a successful youtuber. Over the nearly 5 years of its existence, it’s gained 150,000 views so far. And it’s still getting a good stream of new views even today. It’s a popular video to help get myself known and it’s my biggest source of inspiration. It is proof that I’m capable of doing something worth noticing

Sometime within a week before March 4, 2009, ephoenix told me about a Melee tournament he would be going to. He might have told me to look it up on Smashboards or have given me a link to the thread on Smashboards, so I checked the thread. It was surprisingly within biking distance from where I lived. I didn’t think a tournament would happen to be so close. I never bother looking because I never had a drivers license for a long time. A car wouldn’t be necessary to go only 7.6 miles. I biked there

It only took me an hour and I arrived right when it was scheduled to start. The perhaps socially awkward thing was that it was being held at the host’s house and no one else was there but him vacuum cleaning the basement. A friend of his chilling there doing basically nothing. I felt like I arrived a little too early

An interesting thing about him was that he knew me. “You were at MAGFest, right?” were the best words I can recall. “Is this your 1st tournament?” I responded with a yes to both answers and he ended that introduction with a remark that would be questionable outside of a gaming community “You’re going to get *****”

He wasn’t lying so much when he said that. In our 1st few games against each other, he was 2 stocking (winning with 2 stocks left) my Captain Falcon with Bowser. Among evenly skilled players, it should be the reverse happening. As time passed, more players began to show up. No matter who I played against, I always lost. To a bit of my surprise, someone I knew from high school showed up. I’ve heard about him being really good at Smash Brothers from a few other students. Too bad I was too shy to ever talk about the game with him back then. I’ve only once ever played against him at school in a game of Smash64. But that wasn’t even a complete game we played. We had to leave after only a minute of playing it. For some reason ephoenix didn't show up. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t let it affect me

As for the tournament, I got *****. I lost 0-2 twice in the 2v2 event and 0-2 twice again during 1v1. Sypher was right. I enjoyed it though. Not everyone in the room was significantly better than I was. There were a few times where I managed to impress a few players. Later in the evening, we had 23 players in the room and split everyone into 2 teams of 11 players each. 1 of them chose to sit out. It was great being a part of the crowd screaming and hollering for our players sent in to fight. Towards the end of it, my team was losing by a lot of stocks. For our 3rd last remaining player to send it, my team chose me, so I moved to the seat and got ready. I was a little bit nervous playing in front of a crowd of 21 people watching me

The start of the game wasn’t too friendly. The Sheik player I fought against tech chased me reliably well and I felt like there was nothing I could do. Somehow I did manage to escape and combo him in return, turning it into a see-saw battle. At 1st my weak nerves were my biggest obstacle. I almost suicided on my 1st life by jumping off the stage. The fear gradually faded, or rather transformed into a feeling of excitement. I started to love the crowd cheering behind me. On my 3rd kill, I even threw my fist up in the air as a way to cheer for myself. My team loved my win at the end of my 1st game. It’s nice having someone root for you. Then the other team sent in another Sheik and we traded lives, knocking me out. And then they eliminated our remaining 2 players and we lost. I still count taking 5 stocks with 4 as a win[/collapse]

 

[-Dubs]

Searched up SSBM Mewtwo, saw Taj's combo videos hot damm...

After watching Mango and PP, I decided to take Melee more seriously and switch to Falco.

 

[EddyBearr]

No spoiler because it's short.

I've played Smash since SSB64 came out. I'd known about and (poorly) utilized advanced techniques like SHFFLs, wavelands, or dash dances since about 2006 (actually discovered L-cancelling in 2003 or so myself), but I was into other things so I didn't enter tournaments. 2007-2011 I attended high school in a rural town with no internet access, and by 2008 I no longer had any video games, so that's the end of gaming for a long time. In 2011 I moved back to an urban area, and began searching for competitive smash (mostly Brawl as I thought Brawl was the replacement to Melee), but I was into other things so I never tried too hard. By mid-2012, those things were no longer an option for me, so I searched harder for Smash. My region had a secluded forum and didn't use smashboards, so for the longest time (2011-5/2013), I thought Minnesota had no Smash scene. In early 2013 I finally discovered the MN Smash scene, and I've been somewhat regular in it ever since.

The other things were mostly competitive Yu-Gi-Oh, MapleStory, and Runescape.

 

[_A1]

I started as a casual Brawl Falco player. I looked up videos of SSBB Falco on Youtube, and somehow found Genesis 2 SWS: Mango vs Taj. Never saw Smash the same way since.

 

[RaphaelRobo]

lol I forgot I played PM back when 2.5 existed.

Anyway, since I was tagged, might as well post my story. It always changes a bit based on what I remember at the time I tell it, so whatever.

I was super young once. Then I saw Melee at the local EB Games (because we didn't have Gamestop in NZ) and bought it because Link was on the cover. Then I saw Kirby and fell in love with the character.

Much later I moved to the US. I started to become interested in programming, and began programming fighting games and role playing games in high school. This got me interested in fighting games, and I took my PAL copy of Melee with me to a game development camp over the summer. I was trash lol, but realized Kirby wasn't a good character, so started playing Ganondorf. After that camp, I went back home, bought a copy of NTSC Melee, and learned how to actually play the game.

A few months later I started to have a pocket Kirby.

A few months after that I had a Kirby secondary

A few months after than I abandoned Ganon completely and became a Kirby main.

Kirby is way too fun.

Oh and at my second ever tournament this awesome local player named Dr. PeePee played me in Kirby dittos. I thought it was so cool that someone else would play Kirby with me. Also he's pretty good at the game

Also I'm available on weekends if you want to play some time. I can't drive, but just message me and you can come play at my place. I haven't been to an SnS since the first one, but that first one was a great tournament.

Also you can tag people on smashboards now? lol this site keeps changing.

 

[Massive]

Having purchased Smash 64 on release day I was immensely hyped for the sequel and the new console it came out on. My parents bought me the game and gamecube on release day as an early Christmas present.

I was so excited. I made up silly rules like 5 stock 50% damage scale and started playing basically every character against my brother and all of my friends.
Fast forward 2 years to the end of high school (2003) and I was the "I beat all my friends" guy, effectively undefeated against nearly everyone I had ever played.
I didn't even know smashboards existed at the time (and to be fair, it was very small), and due to most of my friend's not wanting to lose anymore I only got to play sporadically until I went away to school.

The players at my (engineering) university were of a higher caliber than the ones I faced at home, but I still didn't lose a single serious match to anyone at school for 2 years. Then, in 2005, some of my classmates discovered smashboards and learned a bunch of technical stuff in secret in an attempt to beat me. I was pleasantly surprised that wavedashing and l-cancelling were in the game but my friends' early implementations of them were not good enough to beat me consistently. At this point I was cautiously optimistic that I could actually be competitively good at this game, so I went to my first non-local/school tourney: Show Me Your Moves 4.

I did better than I thought I would, actually beating some competitive players (with basically 0 tech skill, haha), but ultimately I did not make it out of pools. My crowning accomplishment at that point was taking a game off of Eddie's Gannondorf with my Ness.

After that I was hooked. I switched mains to Marth (who I mained for the rest of college before switching to puff) and then started learning basically everything I could. I probably spent at least 40 hours a week training/practicing in my room for over a year after that, learning as much tech skill as was around in 2005/2006.

 

[Leirkov]

I started playing Brawl casually in my (commuter) community college's Recreation Room. I loved Melee as a kid and I had MANY hours invested into it. So Brawl was my gateway to enjoying Smash again. I played Falco just for the generic reason I side-played him as a toddler ("looks cool, heh"). At this time we ran Brawl tournaments with weird rulesets and seedings based on "observed power ranking" which made no sense. Eventually I decided I could TO better and when I got a student leadership job on campus, I used that to run the Brawl tournaments. Then someone brought in Melee for nostalgia purposes and we started playing that in the room too. So I ran Melee and Brawl at the same time.

I still had no idea what went on in Smash's community, but then I saw "The Smash Brothers" as a recommended video for me on a lot of my Youtube videos (even unrelated to Smash/games) so I decided why not and clicked it. When I heard of "professional" players in the documentary, I assumed it had some kind of following to competitive. I was highly ranked in League of Legends so I could imagine the depth that a game may have even if you can enjoy it casually. I watched the documentary in one session and instantly loved the idea of technical skill, movement options, and what seems like infinite depth that I saw from this game. The movement of Melee was awesome as a kid and now there was a "new" way to play - and it was competitive, just what I enjoyed.

My other friend, Tom, also got into the documentary and had some minor "local competition" experience (as in the cheap old tournaments where there were no actual competitive players, just fans of the game yknow). So he was hungry as well and we brought competitive Melee to the room and got other players involved. I kept running tourneys. We were still awful. We couldn't SHFFL, let alone SH, for 2 entire semesters. But we started getting into the theory and watching pros/streams etc regularly.

Around the time of PM's 3.0 release, someone brought that in. I didn't read up on it after the documentary, so I was surprised when he said "they made a lot of Melee into Brawl and removed tripping and other cheesy things we hate." With PM and Melee being amazing fun, we started getting better, but still scrubish at everything. People "started " L-Cancelling but we still just got our feet wet.

Tom lives out 40+ minutes from me during the summer (tons of different areas 20+ miles apart from one another congregate to our school), and I lent him my copy of melee + memory card. Since he was so far and we were fairly busy, I wasn't feeling to pick it up ever. I played PM the entire summer (yet I went to my first monthly, for melee only, 2 months prior. I didn't know much and didn't learn anything) and got pretty good at it. I mained Lucario after dropping my attempt at Spacey knowledge transferring from Melee.

Forward to this past fall (overall, 1 1/2 years of casual / experimental play), I started a new club at the campus. The first Smash club. I intended to bring new blood into the scene. Tom and I ran it together, and we taught basic techniques, provided resources, and we got people into the game. Our school tournaments got more competitive, with the expected winners stopped being only Tom and myself, but now people caught up. Some people were already trying to enter the scene and were getting good, so we all started to grow together. By this point I was attending biweeklies. That same event is now a weekly, and I go to 2 weekend weeklies. I got the friend group to go because I told them who attends these tournaments. If you're from NY/Tristate area, you might recognize a few of these names: JKJ, Animal, Codi, Rolex, Boiko. There are many other respected players who attend, so we got destroyed. Suddenly, Tom was able to place 4th at one of the invitations, making a few upsets along the way. He then placed a consistent 7th which was pretty good for consistent 20+ entrants. I was 7th once but I generally placed a bit lower. I was always having closer matches with better players, and Tom and I were consistently around the same skill level, but he plays MUCH better than I do in tournament, he maintains solid consistency.

Combing this, one of my good friends, Ray, had an outside friend (to our friend circle) that was really good at Smash and "would always body Ray" so I was interested. We started playing and I saw what a really solid Falcon actually can do. So our friend groups began merging and now we have a 15+ person Smash network trying to always get fests going and attend more tournaments. Only now are we really seeing true peaks in the long process of getting good, and we can't be anymore excited to continue to get better.

We're still not making huge breaks, not beating top name players, but it's cool to see we're slowly making our way up the ladder over all the time playing this game together.

 

[Effay]

I'm so glad that there's a thread asking about this, because I REALLY want to share my story about how I got into Smash.

I got into Smash about 8-9 months ago, actually. It started when I had gone to spend the night at a friend's house. We played Super Smash Bros Brawl on the wii with wiimote controllers (nunchucks included). I had no interest in Smash at all, until this night. I chose Fox, because I remember watching my brother playing StarFox with his friends on his DS when we were really young, and it would bring back memories I thought. My friend chose Falco, just because I played Fox. We then did teams against Level 3 CPU (I have no idea how we were this scrubby xD). We played on custom stages with items on and the time at 25 minutes. We just barely won every time, and it felt glorious. I then really got into the game. I went home, being in love with Fox (despite being so bad, and only being able to use up-B, side-B, up-tilt, and rapid jab). I had SSBB already, but lost interest in it fast and quit playing for years. So I began playing it again, and kept working my way up the AI levels. I looked at lvl 9 Fox, and thought how legit and amazing he was at beating the other AI, while I was stuck at lvl 5-6 AI. A few weeks later, my friend told me that he beat a lvl 9 Fox. I got pretty jealous and felt left behind, so I got home and went outside of my skill gap to face a lvl 9 Peach, and just barely won in a 1 stock battle. I felt like I had defeated a god. My friend then quit smash to move onto other games. This is where all I had to face were the AI. I worked my way up against the lvl AI, and finally reached lvl 9. Also, at the time, I switched from Fox to Link. I went up against a lvl 9 Fox for the first time with my new character. I somehow won. I had the biggest pop-off, and it was amazing (at least for me at the time). I then figured out Link was bad, so I started switching around from other characters. I then began watching Mango. I really loved the way he played Fox, and it was so fun to watch. I always saw him win (I somehow only watched his victory matches). I then started using Fox again because Mango used him. I got Melee during Christmas, and met a friend (Marth main) to play Melee with. I met another friend who uses Falco, and practice with him too. I learned a lot more about Smash and play it so much better now. I keep getting better, and signed up on smashboards for more tips. I have much more to learn about Melee, and can't wait to compete in my first tourney. (-:

EDIT: I also picked up Peach and Marth, and use Marth the most.In Brawl and Sm4sh I like Lucario.

 

[Roukiske]

Friends showed me a combo video (Shine Blind) around 2006.

I said, I am going to do this to you.

Every time one of us wave shines we usually hum the music used for Zelgadis in the video, DBR - Evolution (Dancefloor Hardcore by Promo DJ).

I guess I can say, thanks Zelgadis

 

[EthralSSB]

This will be short.
In 2005 I was 5 (Currently 15) when my grandpa and grandma gave me my gamecube for my birthday it was the platinum one (Still have it to this day) it came with Melee but when I was a kid nobody else really played smash. So I played it by myself I thought I was pretty good. 9 Years later I would know I was definetly wrong. I had been playing the game casually for 4 years I got brawl I liked it but it wasn't the same so I stopped playing for awhile. 2013 learned about pm loved it Mewtwo was my main and to this day I haven't lost to someone in my town. 2014 Smash 4 came out I'm liking it won't have a real main until I know if Mewtwo is good or not. I host tournaments in my town for all the games. Hoping to goto a Edmonton tourney during the summer with my friend who is almost as good as me not quite. This is alot longer then I thought it would be theres lots of jumps too. I would spoiler but I don't know how on Mobile

 

[Victor Marczyk]

Does anyone feel like they're ready to compete, but only in certain places much smaller than APEX?

 

[papermarkis]

Well my story is far from anything atypical but I'll share it:

Spoiler

Like many competitive smashers, I started off by playing Smash casually just playing matches with friends or doing single player stuff. Smash 64 was my first smash and it quickly became one of my favorite games of all time and 2 years later Melee would take it's place. I also frequented GameFAQs at the time and often discussion of the competitive scene and how people thought wavedashing was broken came up. Unlike most people on the site however, I didn't mind what the competitive scene was doing by turning off items or only playing certain stages or whatever. They're free to do whatever they want.

Eventually after playing Melee casually for about 5 years, the game started to lose it's luster to me. Playing 4 player matches with friends and items started to quickly get boring. I use to be able to play Melee all night for 7 hours or longer but I sometimes had to ask friends could we switch to another game or could we turn items off or anything to potentially make things more interesting. I didn't want to give up on my favorite game of all time even if it was starting to seem boring. Eventually I came across a rather well known Smash tournament video of the original Darkrain combo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdJhhXc3qEs) and suddenly my eyes were opened up. I could try to play Smash competitive to revive my interest in my favorite game. The Darkrain combo was the first time I watched a competitive video and experienced a truly hype moment of gaming and I wanted to attempt to create moments like that.

However I knew nothing on how to find tournaments or competitive players to play against and I was also a high schooler with parents that hated video games and wanted to keep me as far away from them as possible. Becoming a part of the competitive scene would be something that would have to wait until I was no longer living with them, little did I know the competitive scene would practically come to me my first week of college.

My college was only about a 30 minute drive from my parents house but I chose to live on campus anyways to get a taste of life on my own. While me and my roommate who was one of my best friends from high school and someone I often played Melee with were moving in the first day, we spotted a room on our floor with about 4 or 5 guys sitting down playing Melee. Obviously we inquired on whether we could join in after we were done with orientation that night and the RA who's room it was said yes he would be there all night. Me and my friend actually joked on the way to orientation about how it would be funny if one of those guys were one of those competitive players who knew how to wavedash and all that funny stuff. Well we were actually very right.

It was clear not even 5 seconds into a match with the RA that we were completely outclassed in this game in every way imaginable. I'm sure we didn't even take a stock. I've never seen Captain Falcon or hell any character in the game move that way before. After what must've been hours of getting trounced by this guy we ended the games and had a talk with him and sure enough, he was a competitive player who had traveled to tournaments before. Of course we had just gotten demolished so we assumed he may have been a top player or someone well known, but he told us last tournament he had attended he had gotten something like 230th place out of 250 people. This guy was nothing, and me and my friend were somehow worse than nothing. That night I immediately looked up competitive Melee videos including the Advanced How to Play (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n4s5yB7ZkE) and began training. I finally found the spark I needed to make Melee fun again.

Eventually over the months as I adjusted to college life thanks to the same RA who played me that first day (who also is still to this day one of my best friends) and came to his room multiple nights to refine my Melee skills, as he started to see I was serious about improving he invited me to come to a nearby Smashfest hosted every Saturday night he attended. This Smashfest he assured me was attended by many players even better than him. I of course said I would attend.

First night there and just like my first night of college, I got trounced in matches against characters I almost had forgotten even were in Melee. However there was one player who was beating me even worse than everyone else there combined, another Captain Falcon player who played the black color in contrast to my RA's white. If you paid attention my profile on the left here you'll see that I'm from Kansas City and hopefully you already have put 2 and 2 together. This black Falcon was Darkrain. The same player highlighted in the video that got me into competitive Melee in the first place had been living in my city this whole time and now I was getting my ass kicked by him.

The rest is pretty much history. I kept attending Smashfests at Darkrain's place (which we called the Barrio because his house was in a kind of run down hispanic neighborhood) and becoming better friends with everyone who attended. My skills sharpened, I started traveling to tournaments with these guys and somehow gained new appreciation for a game I already considered one of my favorites of all time. Smash also introduced me to other competitive fighters and now I'm an active Smash and anime fighter player and even help to run tournaments here in the Kansas City area. I've meet so many people both in this city and nationwide thanks to Smash and fighting games and I don't plan on stopping this momentum anytime soon.

Oh crap, tried to make it short and ended up writing a novel.

 

[Greed-checkTheTek]

How do I make a reply into a spoiler?

 

[EPsilon933]

How do I make a reply into a spoiler?

[ collapse="title for spoiler" ]

write things

[ /collapse ]

(Remove the spaces, of course)

 

[T-Murder]

I saw a couple of my fellow Kansas City smashers posted on theis thread so I decided to tell my story too. I didn't getinto the competitive scene u ntil my senior year of college. I went to Naka Kon and they had a Brawl tournament. This got me to start playing Brawl again. I had a neighbor named Jake who was a lot better than me, he beat me so bad that I thought I would never play the game as more than a hobby. However, we had another friend coincidentally named Jacob who found out about Smash Boards. By this time we had gotten into PM but still played Brawl some. Ct Delux (aka Free Free Free Lux) reached out ot us on here and invited us to come to a tourney at his apartment. They didn't want to go but I was convinced they were some of the best players in the area so I begged them to go. They finally went and did pretty well but not as well as they would have liked. That was it! I thought that was the last tournament we would go to, but then we watched the smash documentary and met Strong Bad. He invited us to go to a smashfest and some guys house who played black falcon ( notice a common theme). Turns out we were going to Darkrain's house! The same Darkrain I had seen in the documentary. Well at this point I was hooked, I had to be apart of this scene. We started a group called Kc Smash Bros for people who didn't want to travel to Lawrence to play smash; although we're still friends with the Lawrence guys. We had our first tournament Di or Die December 27, 2013, and I almost had a heart attack when 28 people entered PM. We've been going strong ever since and we had 70 people enter one of the DI or Die tourneys. I've learned a lot over the past year. I'm still not the best player and I focus more on TO'ing and commentary now, but I'm still thankful that I found this wonderful community where I really feel like I belong.

 

[NIFOFD]

You might note some similarities between my story and OP's. Not a coincidence

[collapse="NIFOFD's beautiful story"]

I first received my gamecube as a Christmas present from my Grandmother. My friends down the street also had a gamecube and a copy of melee so when I played it at their house, I immediately decided that I had to have the game. As soon as I popped the disk in, I went straight to classic mode and cleared "very easy" using Kirby (my favorite Nintendo character at the time). My brother and our neighbors would play together frequently in versus mode with all items on and 3 stocks (clearly the only way to play), but my opinion on items shifted when I was killed by my opponent on his last stock at 150% by a capsule thrown at me that exploded and sent me off the top of Corneria. After this, I never played seriously with items on again.

It was fun playing with friends, but in time I began to outclass everyone I played with and my friends no longer enjoyed playing against me. I was no longer allowed to play my favorite characters (Roy and Pichu) because Roy was an overpowered version of Marth (clearly he's better because he has fire) and Pichu was a faster and more powerful version of Pikachu. The game ceased to be fun to play alone and I stopped playing it for many years.

Flash forwards a few years and I'm sitting in my local Gamestop with my friend who had dragged me along to buy the latest Pokemon. As I browsed the shelves, the newly released Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii caught my eye, and remembering all the times spent playing it at sleepovers with my friends, I quickly purchased a copy.

Brawl was a fantastic game (though it would later fall out of favor with me). The graphics were far superior to the game I had once known, and all new characters meant an added level of depth to the gameplay. Having settled on Metaknight and Kirby (still my 2 favorite Nintendo characters at the time), I spent countless hours practicing against level 9 cpus. Once again, a lack of friends to play with that were near me in skill made me lose interest in the game and I subsequently stopped playing it.

Flash forward a few years later and I'm a freshmen in highschool. The school day was over, but a senior (@ RaphaelRobo ) I had seen before was sitting towards the back of the band room holding a gamecube controller and staring intently at his laptop. With my curiosity piqued, I walked over to investigate what he was doing, and lo and behold, he was somehow playing melee on his laptop (didn't realize the dolphin emulator existed at the time). Upon asking to play with him, we went to versus mode and I laughed when he selected Ganondorf (Clearly nothing more than a slower Captain Falcon). I ran the possible match-ups through my head and decided to go with Kirby (the obviously superior character). About 2 mins later the match ended in a 4 stock. I reevaluated and decided to go with Fox. Years beforehand, many a friend had been defeated by my blistering firefox assaults. Turns out that approaching with Up Special is generally a poor plan.

This same kid would bring a wii to school during 4th period (Wind Ensemble), and a small group of us would play melee during class together out on a CRT in the hallway. Later I was introduced to Project M (v2.5) and instantly fell in love upon seeing a friend get destroyed by Lucario's spirit bomb. No longer having a copy of melee, I downloaded PM and began practicing so that I would stand a better chance the next time we played in band class.

The year ended and the seniors graduated, but the following year, a bass clarinet player carried on the tradition by bringing in his Wii with Project M for us to play in class. That year I was introduced to a new member of the wind ensemble, a fellow clarinet player who had been following melee competitively before we met and seemed to play all the top tier characters with a greater level of proficiency than the rest of us. I also got to know an alto sax player (Mario main who switched to Luigi, then Marth, and finally Fox), a bassoon player (another Ganondorf main), a trombone player (Marth main who later picked up Ness), a baritone player (Sheik main), and a Trumpet player who played Falco (but wouldn't SHL) and Pikachu.

This group of players would meet and play with each other whenever we had free time in 4th period. Each successive meeting resulted in every member growing to be a better player as slowly the rolling and dash attack spamming faded into more sophisticated options (wdoos, shffl aerials, etc). We all decided to attend our first tourney this year at the UNC Fall Gamesfest. We were all completely destroyed upon having to face some of the top players in NC. While being decimated by Marth chaingrabs on FD, I received some golden Falco advice from PPMD himself: "Use the laser." The bassoon player's younger brother later had his first set in losers bracket against PPMD (who had forfeited in Winner's bracket). It was pretty crazy seeing people irl who we had only previously read about or watched online. Even though we all were knocked out of bracket pretty quick (a few of us managed to take 1 or 2 sets), we spent a lot of time playing friendlies and getting to know people.

After the Fall Gamesfest, some of us started attending PM/Melee weeklies near where we lived. I've attended pretty regularly and have been working on developing my Roy/Pichu/YoungLink. I've gotten better and better as time goes by, nothing is quite as satisfying as going stock for stock with players who used to completely outclass you.

I'll be going to college next year (probably NCSU, but perhaps UNC Chapel Hill), and I can say without a doubt that I intend to be an active part of the smash scene at whatever school I attend. The number of Melee/PM players in our high school continues to grow even with the seniors leaving each year. Looking back it really amazes me what has transpired as a result of that awful Ganon/Kirby 4 stock: I've become friends with dozens of people that I never would have come to know and formed countless memories that have had a large impact on who I am today.
[/collapse]

 

[RaphaelRobo]

You guys still play in period 4?

I might drop by during spring break.

 

[fatman667]

My friend just gave me the game. I was a scrub at the time, so I was spamming a lot of unsafe moves. Then I saw that same friend play against other people and I realized I was not playing the game he was playing. This brought me into competitive Melee. I just thought it was the coolest thing at the time, it still is a really cool game, but it isn't my favorite competitive game atm.

 

[DerpyDayha]

This will be short.
In 2005 I was 5 (Currently 15) when my grandpa and grandma gave me my gamecube for my birthday it was the platinum one (Still have it to this day) it came with Melee but when I was a kid nobody else really played smash. So I played it by myself I thought I was pretty good. 9 Years later I would know I was definetly wrong. I had been playing the game casually for 4 years I got brawl I liked it but it wasn't the same so I stopped playing for awhile. 2013 learned about pm loved it Mewtwo was my main and to this day I haven't lost to someone in my town. 2014 Smash 4 came out I'm liking it won't have a real main until I know if Mewtwo is good or not. I host tournaments in my town for all the games. Hoping to goto a Edmonton tourney during the summer with my friend who is almost as good as me not quite. This is alot longer then I thought it would be theres lots of jumps too. I would spoiler but I don't know how on Mobile

Whoa, u live in edmonton?! So do I! I'd love to know if u have found any good tourneys here.

Well I probably should tell my story. I'm pretty new, so it's not long.

So a few years ago (not quite sure how long), I met a guy at school named Ethan. My parents hadn't bought almost any electronics so I had only a dsi. Ethan, though, had a wii (he still has it), and I'd go to his house and play brawl. It was fun, he'd play Ike, and I'd play lucario. It was super spammy but great fun and I loved the game.

Fast forward a couple years and I have a 3ds, no wii, or any other home console, but I still like smash even though I don't get to play it much. But then the demo for smash 3ds comes out, and I am about to go on a car ride for a while. I download it and immediately main link. He was the only "good" character in the demo. It was fun but I got bored quickly. Then smash for 3ds is released and my friends already have it. I save up a bit and by it right away.

So I start maining sheik, and begin doing well. Then she's nerfed and I just can't play her anymore so I look around. I try out several including marth (who I fall in love with(no homo)), and cf. Cf is still my smash 4 main.

IN playing this game, I start watching YouTube vids. I see the good smash 4 players, but then I wonder why they do so many melee tourneys. I eventually watch the documentary and fall in love with that. After Christmas, I think I will save up for a wii u. But then it hits me. I'll buy a GameCube and melee. So I did. After that, a friend gives me a wii for free. All is well.

In the time I wait for my gc and melee to be shipped, I learn. Eventually I find smashboards. I already knew about the "advanced techs", but still learned so much. I had already known if main Marth. I knew my hands would explode if I played fox, and I didn't like his face either. I already liked Marth in smash 4, and so training began, and with the first advanced tech I ever had learned about: wavedashing. I almost have it down now, and I have a lot of knowledge about other things too. I'm so happy to be part of the community.

Sorry if it's long. I don't know how to spoiler it. I'm on an iPhone and I'm somewhat new on smashboards. So ya, thx to the whole smash community.

 

[deadPhoenix]

My story starts all the way back in 2012, when I'd first moved in with my friend Blaine. He played a lot of Brawl, and loving Smash since a little kid, we started to play a ton together. We eventually got into competitive Smash later that year and competed in some awesome local tournaments. Around this time is when the earlier builds of PM were being released, and apart from knowing the mod made the physics like Melee, all I knew about the mod was that the game was a bit faster. I had no idea about tech skill or the Melee scene.

Fast forward to later 2013. Around the time the documentary came out, a couple of friends I knew from school who played PM started teaching me about tech skill and what fast paced competitive Smash was all about. I watched the documentary later in 2013, learned about the Melee scene, and then was able to witness Melee's comeback into the fighting scene, which is probably one of the most inspirational things I've ever had the privilege of witnessing in my whole life. I stuck with PM for quite some time because it was what I was used to and I loved being able to main Link, who is one of my favorite Nintendo characters of all time. However, I couldn't resist Melee's pull for too long.

Fast forward to the ladder half of 2014, and I was only playing Melee. I couldn't get enough of the game, nor could I get rid of the want to be the best at it. Something about it keeps pulling me in. It's a game with gravity, that's all I have to say. I'm still playing it to this day, I've cycled through a lot of characters and to be honest still don't know who I want to main. I've played only Falco for the past couple of months because I really wanted to get my tech skill in check, and Falco's pretty badass. Puff holds a close place to my heart though, so I don't know if I'm really going to give her up just yet. We'll see.

Either way, my journey with Smash has taught me a lot about myself, it's made me appreciate a scene more than 10 years in making, it's made me a lot of friends, and I owe it a lot. <3

 

[EthralSSB]

Whoa, u live in edmonton?! So do I! I'd love to know if u have found any good tourneys here.
.

I live in a small town outside of Whitecourt but I goto Edmonton alot if you have facebook they have a group up for tournaments and stuff

 

[DerpyDayha]

I live in a small town outside of Whitecourt but I goto Edmonton alot if you have facebook they have a group up for tournaments and stuff

Ya I've seen, I'll be checking a tourney out pretty soon.

 

[d z]

Stumbled on smashboards right around Brawl's release looking to learn more about the game. Came across I Killed Mufasa. Never looked back.

 

[Marth Regalia]

I've been playing Melee ever since it came out. When I first started, naturally I was terrible. I played Roy and Mewtwo simply because I thought they were cool.

Fast-forward to 2008. Brawl comes out, and I decide to switch to that game. I played it for a few years, and then decided it was too slow for me. I kinda dropped out of Smash afterwards, still playing from time to time, but only casually.

Fast-forward to 2012. My friend Max invites me over to his house, and he has Melee out. I think "Sweet" and get ready to have some casual fun with the game. However, this was not to be a casual experience, as he had been watching pro videos and learning advanced techniques. I liked the sound of that, and I picked up Shiek. I loved her to death with her fast combos and strong kill moves.

A few weeks later, I've already got wavedashing, L-Cancelling, and teching down-pat. I'm still playing Shiek at this point, and when Max and I were training, I decided to try out Marth.

He was amazing and I stopped playing Shiek immediately.

Cut to two years later and I'm fantastic at the game. I can take tournaments and the amazing people in my local smash community keep me driven to get better. Unfortunately, due to transportation limitations, I can't go to regional tournaments and show my skills there, but I'm going to compete in EVO 2015 and am currently training my ass off to be the best Marth in Nevada, and eventually, the world.

... Still haven't decided on a Smash tag yet.

 

[fRuitcak3]

I attended a small local tournament that I did absolutely horrid at. I mained Marth and I still do infact but at the time I had no knowledge of the character what so ever. I then wanted to get better after my embarrassing defeat by Kirby mains in the normal bracket and in the losers bracket. So I've now been playing for nearly a full year and am still progressively learning tech!

Sidenote: I'm getting into netplay

 

[gmBottles]

Mine is a pretty simple story, not very long or sentimental, unfortunately. This is just how I was introduced to the comp scene, I've played Smash since I was little.

It all started at the announcement of Smash 4. It was hype, my friends and I were all freaking out. We had been playing Brawl after school on Fridays, recently discovering Project M and playing that casually, along with beginning to watch competitive matches. When we found out that there would be a demo to play at Best Buy we drove out to play it. We brought our Gamecube controllers and everything, which we weren't able to use unfortunately. We left after playing once to put up our controllers in our car, when a group of 3 people get out of their car and start walking in. Suddenly, I hear somebody calling out to me.
"MONEY MAAAATCH"
We go back inside and we just talked to these guys for 2 hours about competitive Smash, where I discovered that there was a comp scene in my area. I was introduced to the community because some guys randomly yelled at me in the Best Buy parking lot.

I've said it before, but thanks to @Saaab and @ CosmoNaughtilus for introducing me to Smash Bros as a competitive game.

 

[CosmoNaughtilus]

Little old me?

 

[Charey]

My story is also a bit long so I put it in a spoiler.[collapse=""]As a Kid I enjoyed Smash64 when I rented it so I bought Melee when it came out. I played Melee a lot with one of my friends, it was one of my go to multiplayer games (The others being Halo co-op and Kirby's Air Ride) and I thought that I was pretty good at it. I mained Marth at the time because I did well with him, plus he had a sword and spoke Japanese.

Fast forward to 2013, I was into the brony community at ponychan at the time. One of the betas of Fighting Is Magic got leaked so I had been playing that and heard about the EVO donation drive which got me excited about EVO. FiM lost but still I had I watched a bit of APEX that year and thought it would be fun to watch the EVO live, and since I was going I might as well join the Melee tournament. I lost as quickly as would be expected but I enjoyed just watching everything.

I decided that with a new Smash game coming out that would be a good time to try to get into a scene, starting at the ground with everyone else so I started going to local a weekly when Smash4 came out. When big tournaments came I joined Melee as well because it was there but still got absolutely destroyed every time.

Then I watch APEX2015 and AMSA rocking Yoshi and decided to try someone else and put some training in before the next big tournament. I chose Samus because I liked bomb movement and learned how to wavedash.(Not well but at least I could) The tournament starts and my first opponent is one of the best Melee players in the state. I still lose badly but this time I am not helpless, I managed to take a stock off of him both games and for a couple of moments I got control of the match.

So now I am trying to get netplay running so I can start really learning how to play at a high level.[/collapse]

 

[pershona]

Got Brawl at release date, played it casually for a lot of time, saw Evo 2013 and got interested in competitive Smash. Finally got a copy of Melee September of last year, and that's where i started taking the game seriously.

 

[ArcDawn]

ig it's a bit long since people replied in this thread but I like these kinds of stories so I'll add my own
*Get ready for a bit of a story*

Spoiler

Started playing Melee as a youngin' in early elementary. I was also that guy that could beat all my friends at home which resulted in them trying to team up against me when 1v1s weren't fun to play anymore. OFC back then we didn't even know about the competitive scene so we had some wacky rules and played a lot on the non-banned stages. Unlocking new characters was probably the coolest part of the game as we got to see nintendo characters just suddenly interrupt the flow of FFAs and stuff and see who actually manages to beat them to unlock them for play. But yeah when my friends weren't around, I'd try to finish Event mode and get new records in the 1 player modes of melee. as I researched more strategies for these things stumbled upon the superdoodleman's perfect control videos. I had no idea anyone could do stuff like that in melee (ofc most things are humanly impossible) but that began my interest in learning tech that wasn't pseudo-batdropping (dropping the bat+spike and grabbing the bat on the ground). I learned some tech from the advanced: guide to melee series on youtube but only really took away the ability to wavedash (not applying it) and knowledge of how to l-cancel into shine. Learning this stuff basically had no impact on my smash ability at the time because I didn't have anyone to play against regularly (the friends I'm talking about come by to play like maybe 9 times a year) I was also playing Fox at the time and relied on rolls and stuff to win.
-> Fast forward to brawl's release date
Got Brawl day 1 and basically rushed through Subspace emissary and played w/ all the new items. Brawl was fun for the first few months I had it but I was deeply saddened by the lack of character specific target tests and a lamer "skilless" HRC. I was also beating most of my friends in brawl which made me lose motivation to participate as people started to team up on me again. (Toon link player who spammed projectiles and dair'd people lol) I reverted back to melee after awhile however because I was an avid stadium/Event match player. (I still have some uploaded HRCs from back then on youtube) That was also beginning to wane after awhile as other games came out and me being me, I just HAD to buy them and play it XD. However, Brawl hacks were suddenly becomming a thing and I became super interested in the Brawl hacking community.
Long story short, I played around with a bunch of hacks and it revived my interest in smash bros for a bit. ( I made this really OP falcon moveset mod and used it to surprise my friends ) I was more into SC2 at the time but I'd make room for some smash every now and then. Eventually I'd stumble across Project M as a result of one of those friends that I played with showed me the Turbo tuesdays videos. By that time we were all into brawl hacks and it just happened that it was brough up. Remembering the old times in Melee and Brawl, I decided to give Project M a shot to see it it would revive my interest in playing "Competitive" smash. I brought Project M to my Marching band camp and a few of us played some smash like the good old days. The new characters with fresh moveset was enough to keep me engaged till Senior Prom night where I actually hosted a smash bros hangout instead of attending prom. I played against a friend of mine who was beating me w/ DDD in P:M 3.0 (at this point I was able to learn a decent amount about how to apply wavedashing, l-cancelling and SHFFLs) Although he beat me , I was fairly confident in my ability to play smash as I picked up on the techniques he was doing and learned how to do it.) at this point, I'm back to being better than my friends in smash and I was also about to go away to college and take a summer trip in Taiwan.
-> Enter college at Case Western Reserve University
I enjoyed myself during the first few weeks of orientation and was beating kids in smash there which soon became my identity as the smash guy. People would ask me to play smash with them and I'd just **** around with them for a bit before heading back to my humble abode to do other things. Eventually I heard a rumor about these smash bros kids who only play smash in their rooms basically 24/7. I was skeptical about them but decided to head on over there and challenge them to a battle. Needless to say I got wrecked. They played Project M and Melee and they were doing stuff I thought I saw in combo videos. These 5 guys in a room were basically on my hitlist of "who to beat" and I trained with them a bit, hoping that I could at least catch up. They played for like 9 hours a day while I played maybe 4 hours on the weekend. I did not catch up at all. I met another smasher in my physics class and I befriended him. I trained with him a bit too, and he was closer to my level, and it was only 1 person so I could play more games at a time. I was perfecting my PS-ing with Mewtwo in 3.0 just before I left for Youmacon 2014. I played in both the starcraft 2 tourney and PM tourney but I decided to focus on smash more. I got 13th, losing to ZBet in a close set. But as I played friendlies at Youmacon, I played against some melee people and figured out I was pretty bad at melee. I thought that PM skill would transfer over, but then the guy showed me that I had much to learn. Soon, as I got back to campus, I tried to play more PM but school wouldn't allow it and the 3.5 update included so many nerfs that I didn't feel were good for the game. I picked up Melee again after a long hiatus and began hosting the CWRU Fight club during the second semester of college.The weekly's creation was in response to the other Cleveland weekly that soon also began to fade that was hosted at B-side because it was on a tuesday (a bad day for me and most people) and luckily I was able to attract a whole slew of people to join in on the fun and thus began my journey into competitive melee.
You can see some of our VODs on https://www.youtube.com/user/theArcOfDawn
TL;DR
was good at smash compared to friends, get owned at college and youmacon, start a weekly at CWRU to get involved competitively. I also switched mains from Falco->Marth-> back to Falco -> Ice Climbers

 

[StrangeJedi]

My story is generic. I started player Smash right around the time Smash64 was released, was really casul in those days. I started looking up videos when Melee hit the set, learning combos and techs, getting better and better. Don't care for brawl or Smash 4 much, mainly stick to melee or PM. I mean, I like 4, it's 10x better than brawl and all, but there is no beating melee. But, I just recently got more competitive with Smash, hope to soon go to a tournament and prove my worth.

So there is my story. Short and sweet.

 

[CAUP]

When I was like 5 kids in my neighborhood would play melee with my older brother. They would play free for all, items on. I was so bad I would try to hide behind crates the whole match and then hope my opponent SDed. I played as Kirby

I think the game really stuck with us, me and my brother. We kept playing, him as Roy and me as Kirby. One day I randomly switched to peach and I've been a peach main every since.

We basically always knew about the competitive scene through YouTube and EPsilon videos : ) Ken was unbeatable to us. Then came Mango and the new gods. It was incredible following them.

So then I just stated going to tournaments and beating some people. That's about it. Melee is incredible

 

[Comet7]

Spoiler

i started as a semi-casual brawl player, and came here to find matches with good players online after being destroyed by someone else in a different forum around mid-2013. at the time i was studying a lot (and i mean A LOT) of competitive brawl vids and just trying to get better, but i hadn't discovered my scene yet. i also took notice of melee around zenith 2012, but didn't care about it that much. i was just trying to improve during those days, and my competitive drive started building up a bit more.

jump to when PM 3.0 came out in january, i was a bit more interested in that and melee and thought "why not" and downloaded PM. i loved it and immediately dropped brawl. after that, in june, i got a copy of melee on amazing (the process of getting it was unexpectedly tedious for a variety of reasons, which was why it took so long). i was already competitively satisfied with PM, but pichu is my favorite pokemon, so i wanted melee just for that. i was also looking for tournaments that were close enough to make it to, and found one of a decent size about an hour away. i entered melee and PM, and i was destroyed in melee (i actually didn't do that bad in PM :] ). from then on, i just wanted to get better and better, and found my local scene, blah blah blah, and here i am now. pichu's a secondary for me right now, and i'm trying to get better and learn more about the game as fox, but i'm planning on going back to the little rat and doing well with him once i get to a much higher skill level.

 

[Deleted member]

[collapse=it's short but i wanted to join the spoiler gang]
I got my Gamecube 9 months after it came out, at the time I was only 6 months old. I have absolutely no idea what my father was thinking but oh well I'll roll with it. Anyway long story short I played the ever lasting hell out of that Gamecube. I was so young at the time that I didn't go to nursery (preschool for you mericans) so I had nothing to do other than play my Gamecube with my mum and occasionally go to friends of my parents and play with their children, but mostly Gamcecube.

I don't know the date nor do I have any guess as to what it might be but I went to --- and I remember loving to play video games with my older cousin (I would have been about 4 at the time, he would have been about 13 or possibly younger I'm not sure) and whilst playing his PS2 I saw he had a Gamcube among his shelf of games (his dad is quite well off and they basically dedicated their basement to video games and a guest bed that holds 2 as their house is big and really had no use for the ground floor) and asked if I could play it, he said yes of course because his mum would probably give him into trouble for not letting his younger cousins play even though we are all annoying assholes Anyway he pulled out his favorite game, Melee. I didn't own a copy of Melee for my GC so I was immediately interested. The only memory from that play session was me telling him that my younger cousin was trash and him laughing, that's my earliest memory of Smash Bros.

Fast forward to late 2010 early 2011 I'm not 100% sure. Anyway a bunch of family stuff happened and I ended up getting moved schools a couple of times and this was the final school that I would go to (other than high school) because I actually still live here. Anyway I went to this thing called after school care of out of school care. It's just a group of adults that pick children up from the playground and let them play at the building they were stationed in so that if parents are maybe working late their kid wont be standing in the school grounds forever. My mum worked full time 5 days a week so I went there everyday, for about 2 years, even on summer holidays, until I was considered old enough to be left a key and use the house on my own.

Anyway I was a regular and was well known by that staff and other kids that went there, one day the place bought a Wii and everyone was hype, a couple days after having the Wii in the new place a kid that went fairly often brought in a copy of a game called Super Smash Bros. Brawl and I instantly fell in love with it. Because I was there every day Monday through Friday I was able to play the Wii pretty much everyday unless if it was busy. So there would be days when only 5 kids came because the parents got a holiday or something and be home in time so they could pick their kids up (the average was about 15-20 kids everyday) so on these days I would get very lonely as I had no friends to play with but I played Brawl on my own, getting every stage and character unlocked on that thing, and because I spent so much time on it I quickly became the best Smash player in the school, beating kids that were 3 years older than me, I was considered a god. I was the only one capable of unlocking Wolf because people found it hard to kill him when he approaches. So naturally I picked up the Wii mote (we did not have realize the GC controllers work with a Wii never mind have it working with Brawl) and beat Wolf first try, barely taking any damage and from that point on wards Wolf was my main.

Brawl eventually faded away from my life as people started getting bored playing me because I always won so I stopped playing as well.

Then came January of this year, I was at my dads house and found my own old copy of Brawl, I plugged in my Wii that has just been collecting dust over the past year or so that I have not touched it. I played Brawl for about 20 minutes but stopped because it made me sad that all those memories of playing kids at school are gone and I will never get them back. I later googled Brawl because I was intrigued and found about Sm4sh. I didn't know this game had sequels! Soon after I found out about Melee and 64. They seemed cool and I wanted to play them so I downloaded Dolphin and played Melee with a keyboard... Welp, that didn't work! I ended up ordering 2 cheap £5 third party GC controllers off Ebay and a GC to PC adapter. (I had given my GC to charity a few years back because my mum thought I would never play it again and it took up space) I played Melee and found my lost love for the Smash Bros. series once more. Found out about competitive play, started tech skill. Realized that the frame **** I was getting on PC wasn't good enough, so I bought a copy of Melee off Ebay and played it on my Wii. Bought the White Smash GC controller that came out with Sm4sh and I found a shop that hosted friendlies and I went, got my ass beat hard and now I regularly attend!

I hope to become one of the youngest top players in Scotland. See how that goes...
[/collapse]

 

[krazyzyko]

Back in '05 l started talking **** on supercheats and they sent me a link to smashboards. Regional zones, went to a few smashfest, saw shined blind and that was it.

 

[Zaktan]

[collapse="A bit long"] I haven't been into Smash for even a year, but whatever. One day in school this kid just starts talking to me about the Brawl meta-game after I ask why MK was broken, I found it really interested and eventually me and him talked about Smash every day. This inspired me to buy Sm4sh...and I sucked. After telling him that I bought Sm4sh we started talking about it, and through the days I practiced, practiced, and practiced until I was at the level of a casual :/. Eventually, I saw the Doc...and this changed everything; I started to get interested in Melee and PM so I bought Melee and downloaded PM. Throughout my 11 or so total viewings of the Doc I started to sympathize with the player whom is now my favorite, Mew2King. I related to Mew2King because of his apparent lack of natural talent at the game and the fact that he had to train a lot to become good, which is basically me at anything I do. So with this image of M2K(My friends even tell me I look like him, which isn't really a good thing) I started to practice everyday. Eventually I invited my friend over to play Sm4sh, Melee, and PM. He beat me at all of them despite barely playing Melee and Never playing PM, this is probably because either the Sm4sh skill somehow transferred or he is what I envy the most, naturally talented at vidja games. The fact that he could beat me at every game without playing them made me quite sad/salty, which inspired me to train even more. So flash forward a Month or two and I had stopped practicing for about 2 weeks, when I realized that today was the day that the computer teacher was hosting a Sm4sh tourney, I had been to one before I had the game to spectate, so even though I wasn't confident in my skill I entered; mainly because of the fact that my friend Erick, and the other best player in the school had not entered. So low and behold I get 2nd, beating the people who were supposedly better than me. This gave me some confidence and I picked up the game again with more focus of Sm4sh. Flash foward again to when I write this and I'm gonna host a tourney with my friends to determine who is the best in our grade. I feel extremely happy to be growing the Smash community in my school and friends, and who knows, maybe this will turn into a weekly tourney series...
[/collapse]

TL;DR;
Friend talked to me about the Brawl Meta, Saw the Doc, lol m2k.

 

[Darkness_]

I started with Brawl, back when it was first released. I played it casually until about 2013. I played it competitively for a while, I entered online tournaments for a while and I did decently, getting 25th at highest. In summer 2014, my training partner and I switched to Project M as he found a way to get it to work on our PAL Wiis. We started practicing all the Melee tech available in PM, and we managed to learn it quite quickly. Well, he did, anyway, I lost my motivation for a while. My motivation came back a few months later, though, after watching the Smash documentary. I started spending all of my free time learning Melee/PM tech, and I got a lot of it down in just a month. Now I am tournament ready, but there is no Smash scene near me, so haven't entered any tournaments yet. I primarily play Melee competitively, but I also occasionally play PM and Sm4sh. I have almost completely dropped Brawl.

 

[Clint Jaguar]

I got Melee in 2002 and loved it but I only found out about the competitive side in 2012. By this point I hadn't played Melee in quite some time and never picked up Brawl, so I just ignored it. Then I saw the top 8 of Evo 2013 and I began to get interested in the game again. I started watching more matches and then decided to dig up my Gamecube and start playing the game seriously. Still I wasn't sure if I would really put that much time into it. It was just something cool to experiment with. I kept playing to the point where I would practice at least once a day or every other day. Sadly I knew no one who had the same passion for the game or had even heard about it so I was stuck to practising against computers. In retrospect this was a huge waste of time since I learnt nothing.

In 2014 heard that Smash 4 was coming out later in the year and decided to finally pick up Brawl. Hated it. Then sometime later in 2014 I finally saw the documentary and I was hooked. I got a CRT, started learning all the advanced techniques, watched even more professional matches and started searching for nearby tournaments. Smash 4 arrived and I now play it just for the online multiplayer. It's not perfect but I use it to practice my neutral game. Anything's better than CPUs.

I attended my first tournament about a month ago and yeah, I suck but I don't care. As long as I learn from my mistakes and hopefully get better with time, I'll keep playing. I don't usually care for fighting games but Melee's combo system really appeals to me. It's the same reason why I fell in love for games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. Whether I'll ever become the best or not doesn't really matter. The real thrill of Melee is beating your opponent in the most stylish manner possible. Being creative is the name of the game and it's this reason why Smash 64 has also really grown on me. The day I grow tied of the mechanics in 64 and Melee is the day I quit.