After Smash 4’s announcement at E3 2013, many top Brawl players who’d grown disillusioned with their game loudly shared their excitement to hit the reset button and jump ship to a newer, shinier release. Smash 4’s debut signified a new era for the community, as Nintendo’s marketing showed a genuine interest to connect with us for the first time in history; competitive players were invited to play Smash 4 demos at private press events, Nintendo of Canada gifted early copies to tournament organizers and top players, and sixteen Smash personalities competed in a highly publicized invitation-only tournament at E3 2014. Smash 4 was included in the lineup for EVO 2015, an honor not afforded to Brawl since 2009. The hype for Smash 4 was unstoppable, and it looked as if Brawl was going to be all but left behind in the dust like an old toy lost in a crawlspace.
A huge crowd gathered for Smash 4 at EVO 2015.
What used to be a healthy dispersion of Brawl communities across the world dwindled into tiny pockets (or even just single players) where those communities once stood. In North America, those players’ opportunities to gather and compete dried up as commercial rents skyrocketed, affordable venues closed down, and TOs for more popular games retired (or ran out of) resources that would have given room for Brawl to piggyback off of their events. The grassroots era was ending and opportunities for Brawl fans to play together were disappearing.
All hope was not lost though, as Brawl’s well never ran completely dry. Wii hackers introduced “Wiimmfi” in 2014, a service reviving Brawl’s built-in netplay via third party servers. Brawl’s native netcode leaves much to be desired, so in 2015, Project M developer SOJ gifted a workable netplay configuration to the Brawl community. Later that year, Smasher VZ (formerly V115) created a community for Brawl fans known as “Brawl Bois” (now Brawl Central). This hub allows people who are still hungering to play Smash’s third release to find each other, play with each other across long distances, and share information about any in-person tournaments that they discover.
Offline Brawl has a vestige of security in Super Smash Con, which since its inception in 2015 has included every official release of the series in its tournament lineup. This became the de-facto annual major for Brawl players, though it’s always been misunderstood by outsiders as simply being a side bracket that rusty ex-Brawlers join for unserious fun. In reality, dedicated Brawl players such as Cody, 686M, Player-1, and Hoenn have risen up as dominant forces to prevent returning veterans from reprising their former glory. Brawl’s online community is abundant with netplay tournaments and players looking for friendlies—even Otori, the legendary Apex 2012 champion, can be occasionally found looking for opponents. The community is big enough to maintain a series of competing ranking systems that get published roughly once a year, and Super Smash Con is the community’s biggest annual chance to show off the fruits of its labor.
Brawl’s top 8 at Super Smash Con 2023.
“It hasn't been without its frustrations,” ninja1167 says of doing his part to keep Brawl alive—he’s the organizer of The Return, a netplay tournament series that he started in 2022 with the ambition of keeping the Brawl ball rolling. The community isn’t without its drama, and some events attract low turnout, but helping the community grow has nonetheless been rewarding for him. He mentioned that projects and content such as the Brawl rankings and updated tier lists have attracted new netplayers who have stuck around for the long term. ninja1167 is only one of many people bringing players together and doing their part to bring outsiders in.
The underground, but still healthy, nature of Brawl’s community is reflected in its steady support at Super Smash Con, hovering around 160-180 entrants between 2018 and 2022. But as Brawl players never stopped petitioning to carve out new spaces for their game among the greater Smash pantheon, a turning point emerged in late 2022 in response to their efforts. Brawl had decently popular side events (both official and unofficial) at major tournaments like The Big House, Genesis, and GOML. More regional tournaments began offering it as a side event as well. Brawl-centric tournaments also started popping up, such as Xanadu Origins, a Brawl and Smash 64 only tournament, which attracted about half of Brawl’s top 15 players. And Super Smash Con’s 2023 bracket shot up to an encouraging count of 223 entrants—the most seen at a Brawl tournament since Apex 2014—including attendance from top Norwegian players Bike and Gardex, the former of whom placed among the top 8 and knocked champion 686M into the loser’s bracket. “Having more tournaments has been helpful for the scene,” says ninja1167, noting that Brawl Central’s membership jumped from 1800-1900 members to around 2500 over this period.
But perhaps nothing demonstrates a resurging interest in Brawl quite so blatantly as the public reaction to SKUNCH’s YouTube channel, “Brawlternative,” which debuted in May 2024 with a single video, “The Worst Matchup in Smash History was in Brawl(It's not Metaknight).”
SKUNCH’s video opens with a lengthy technical deep dive into the uniquely complex logic of grabs in Brawl, and then explains what that logic implies for the obscure matchup at the focus of the video. To make his points more appreciable to a broad audience, SKUNCH compares Brawl’s grab mechanics to those of Melee, a game the viewer is likely to be more familiar with. The video’s untapped content domain, attention-grabbing presentation style, and high quality editing caught onlookers by surprise, and Brawlternative reached over 10,000 subscribers from just that one video. At the time of publishing, the channel now has four videos and over 40,000 subscribers.
Regarding the presence of pre-existing Brawl content, SKUNCH had this to say:
Deciding to be the change he wished to see for a game he loved, SKUNCH launched his channel, and it hit the YouTube algorithm harder than he could have imagined. “To be honest I didn’t expect anything, at all,” SKUNCH says. “My original stretch goal for my first video was 10k views over the course of a month, and on the 3rd day the video was uploaded it only had 25 views, so the channel popping off from day 4 onwards was bonkers.” It would be an understatement to say that he met his stretch goal—after the first month, the video sits at 350,000 views.
The Brawl diehards who have been working hard to keep the game afloat for the last 10 years were overjoyed. “This is absolutely amazing content and what a Brawl lover myself has been dying for,” veteran player RipplePuff says of Brawlternative. ninja1167 adds, “It’s really cool to see Brawlternative getting all these views and interest in the game, and we’ve gotten some new netplayers around the same time as well. Content has really always been the key, and this is a big way we can draw people into the community.”
But SKUNCH’s channel couldn’t have taken off so strongly if there wasn’t a market for its content. Why is this the right time to wander back toward the Smash series’ maligned middle child?
SKUNCH grew up playing Brawl, but came of age after its golden competitive age had ended—and judging by his YouTube comments, he’s only one of thousands of people with a similar history who are now reflecting on the game with warm nostalgia. “I need somebody to teach me about the history of my childhood game,” says commenter “bacheese.” “I am pleased to see someone speaking about Brawl beyond the surface level write-offs that you often see when the topic comes up in videos,” says “Andr0meda115.” “Looking back Brawl does seem like it was a fever dream, but damn that fever dream meant a lot to me,” says “8saiharamasukoi.” Other commenters were simply overjoyed to stumble upon in-depth Brawl content at all.
The future looks bright for Brawl.
For the greater Smash community, it could simply be that enough time has passed and they are now willing to reflect on the unique and special aspects of Brawl positively instead of scornfully. Brawl offers a vast wealth of interesting tech and unique combat design among its entire roster that has traditionally gone ignored among the overwhelming discourse about tripping, Meta Knight, and chaingrabs. The celebration of Brawl’s fascinating depth in Brawlternative is turning people’s attention back toward the game, and the community that kept Brawl alive ensured that there are still spaces to welcome those people. “I think Brawl is a great game, both for fun and competitively, and would like to see it grow and become more on par with some of the other smash games in terms of community size, and I think we are on our way there,” ninja1167 says.
Fans enjoying a rekindled interest in Brawl have the opportunity to test his theory right now—early registration for Supernova (formerly Super Smash Con) has just opened. Beyond this August, we can look forward to even more big moves for Brawl, such as the ongoing Brawlback project that promises to breathe new life into the game with rollback functionality for Dolphin netplay. SKUNCH is keeping his momentum going, too: “Now that I’ve got an audience, I’ve been able to crowdsource info and meet people with the same passions I have, which has in-turn taught me more about the game which lets me post more interesting content. I love Brawl!”
The way things are going, it looks like there will be no end in sight for this stubborn game that refuses to be forgotten.
Credits:
Writing:
pidgezero_one
Editing: @Sari
Thumbnail Graphic: @Zerp
Social Media: @Zerp
Special Thanks:
ninja1167
, SKUNCH
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