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Smashboards: The Early Days 2000-2003

MLG_JV

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The Early Days: 2000-2003
By: Yours Truly (and as a testament to how few people from back then are still around, I tried to pawn off writing duties to some other people but could not find a single person).

*Note* I am writing off memory, and well this was a long time ago. So apologizes if anything is not completely correct or other things overlooked. It also deals primarily with the US and the smash side of smashboards, which I of course understand, there has always been more to our community than.


The community was tiny. Any state, region, or group was lucky to have more than 10-15 competitive smashers in it. Most did not have a handful or any at all yet. It was an odd time. Smashboards was a group of people that really liked smash, played with their friends or family, and were looking for a way to compete or learn about advanced strategies. Most people did not find out about the boards from a search engine, from a friend, local tournament, or anything like that. You were generally on a different board. Perhaps it was gamefaqs, gamespot, meetup, or something. And you were looking to learn or just talk about things from the game (Melee) and you either made a topic or post about smash. At that point some dedicated smashboards member whom was scouring the net for people to play with, people to add to the community, said "go to smashboards.com" (*Note* This group, after I was initially introduced to the boards by on gfaqs, included me and had me using every possible resource I had to find people and get them into competitive smash).

National tournaments were virtually non-existent. Local tournaments ordinarily consisted of 10 or so people from your state and a few different awesome people (yes many times back then it was just one person, as opposed to a group) that would drive several hours for a 10-15 man tournament just cause they wanted to compete. They were almost always held at someones house as only later did people start to expand onto actual venues.

Advanced techs were just emerging. Even though it had been around since the days of Smash 64 one of the first thing you generally learned to use was edge hogging. Wavedashing was a major breakthrough, that left people both amazed and repeatedly practicing to get it down. The various chain grabs were just starting to be discovered (Marth on space animals, sheik on sheik, gannon on sheik, etc) and even that was slow just because people did not move fast enough out of the animation end to string together all that stuff and had not fully grasped the concept of chain grabbing back then. Things like waveshines, falco's short hop laser, jiggly's up throw rest, etc emerged at various points and the knowledge of them was shared and quickly adopted. The game and community was in a constant state of discovery and learning. Other things like ledge teching (first seen by Captain Jack when he came over from Japan, I believe), ICs infinites, DKs/Mewtwos Chains, would not be discovered for years.

The first of its kind that could have been called a national tournament within our community was "Tournament Go" (TG) in Socal. It was hosted by MattDeezie in his parents house. Free airport rides were provided, everyone got to stay/crash at his house, and it really just set the standard for what the level of hospitality and community contributions would be for smash events. I do think this was a really important event in the history of our community and something that really put us on the right track.

Some top players back then by region were

West Coast- Recipherus, Isai, and Sam (slightly later did Ken emerged with a pretty awesome $100 money match with the current cali greats)
Midwest- BigGman, King Luigi, SBP (Smashbrospro)
East Coast- Chillindude, Mild, and Azen

The south was sort of in its infancy with not a lot of well known players emerging from there and it being the slow growing of the regional communities. Although as you can see by now the South is both strong and vibrant.


Its pretty unbelievable to see what the community has grown into since its inception and I think if you had the opportunity to speak with some of these early members they would admit the growth and size of the current community has surpassed their wildest expectations.
 

Teran

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Yo man I heard that jv3x3 guy was pretty good too.

Good read.

Also it's funny I think a lot of people don't know who you actually are.
 

KoRoBeNiKi

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you should try to interview chillin or one of these people, isn't he still around
 

AOB

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I remember checking out the thread in the SBR where MattDeezie first proposed the idea of a regional tournament. People were very skeptical about the idea of traveling to some guy's house and spending the night just to play Smash.
 

Smasherx74

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Was Smash64 the first main thing in 2000? Because all you ever hear about is Melee and brawl. No one ever talks about smash64 >_>
 

MLG_JV

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I thought he meant "Chillin and his brother, and Azen".
I did, sorry fellas, has been corrected to mild (whom I knew but could not think of his name)


Yo man I heard that jv3x3 guy was pretty good too.

Good read.

Also it's funny I think a lot of people don't know who you actually are.
Haha, yea I was pretty up there back in the day. And yes that was my smashboards account prior to switching to this one. But thanks for the mention dude.
 

Vyse

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Hey JV, A long time ago Jam and I considered writing a 'History of smash' type dealio, but I never got around to it.

Here are a bunch of links pre-2003 with varying significance (or I found interesting to read)
Before 2003:

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4141

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4249

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4204

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4227

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4220

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4402

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=4194

Dunno if you'd be willing to unearth them for me, but if you did, there's some real history in there, like Ken's first posts on smashboards and when they first clashed with MattDotZeb.
 

Tavo_7

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Just to clear a few things, the TG series of tournaments was always in NorCal by MattDeezie (Matt Dahlgren, who actually has a career in the video game industry today. Last I saw, he was a marketing manager for Capcom http://vimeo.com/3619233 )

TG4 could be considered the first "national/international" of its kind as the top EC/Midwest/Texas/Florida/Europe attending (Azen/Wes/Eddie/Caveman/MrSilver) and it was an items tourney. Melee backroom didn't exist yet so the community was still molding out a standardized rule set. WC was basically items at 3 stock and EC was no items with 5+ stock from my early recollection. Ken vs. Sam was the first hyped money match that took place at TG4.

I hosted the first SoCal tourneys in L.A. with Matt’s crew attending the first two tournaments. My third tournament was Ken’s first “smashboards” tourney he attended with him beating out Recipherus in grand finals (Isai also attended to play Ken in smash 64, Isai’s pika vs. Ken’s falcon).
 

MLG_JV

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Just to clear a few things, the TG series of tournaments was always in NorCal by MattDeezie (Matt Dahlgren, who actually has a career in the video game industry today. Last I saw, he was a marketing manager for Capcom http://vimeo.com/3619233 )

TG4 could be considered the first "national/international" of its kind as the top EC/Midwest/Texas/Florida/Europe attending (Azen/Wes/Eddie/Caveman/MrSilver) and it was an items tourney. Melee backroom didn't exist yet so the community was still molding out a standardized rule set. WC was basically items at 3 stock and EC was no items with 5+ stock from my early recollection. Ken vs. Sam was the first hyped money match that took place at TG4.

I hosted the first SoCal tourneys in L.A. with Matt’s crew attending the first two tournaments. My third tournament was Ken’s first “smashboards” tourney he attended with him beating out Recipherus in grand finals (Isai also attended to play Ken in smash 64, Isai’s pika vs. Ken’s falcon).
Tavo, whats up dude! Thanks for the west coast clarification. I remembered it correctly where ken did start off his smash career with a $100 money match vs matt d and recipherus right? And everyone on the boards (me included) thought ken was going to get destoried only to see him either win both or split with both those guys coming back to update the boards of him being really good. And items being on, I remembered but forgot to include in the actual post but is something certainly worth mentioning.
 

Vyse

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Just to clear a few things, the TG series of tournaments was always in NorCal by MattDeezie (Matt Dahlgren, who actually has a career in the video game industry today. Last I saw, he was a marketing manager for Capcom http://vimeo.com/3619233 )

TG4 could be considered the first "national/international" of its kind as the top EC/Midwest/Texas/Florida/Europe attending (Azen/Wes/Eddie/Caveman/MrSilver) and it was an items tourney. Melee backroom didn't exist yet so the community was still molding out a standardized rule set. WC was basically items at 3 stock and EC was no items with 5+ stock from my early recollection. Ken vs. Sam was the first hyped money match that took place at TG4.

I hosted the first SoCal tourneys in L.A. with Matt’s crew attending the first two tournaments. My third tournament was Ken’s first “smashboards” tourney he attended with him beating out Recipherus in grand finals (Isai also attended to play Ken in smash 64, Isai’s pika vs. Ken’s falcon).
Tavo, whats up dude! Thanks for the west coast clarification. I remembered it correctly where ken did start off his smash career with a $100 money match vs matt d and recipherus right? And everyone on the boards (me included) thought ken was going to get destoried only to see him either win both or split with both those guys coming back to update the boards of him being really good. And items being on, I remembered but forgot to include in the actual post but is something certainly worth mentioning.
All of this is documented in one of the threads I linked before ;X

Also are MattDeezie and MattDotZeb two different people? I cannot remember.
 

Tavo_7

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Tavo, whats up dude! Thanks for the west coast clarification. I remembered it correctly where ken did start off his smash career with a $100 money match vs matt d and recipherus right? And everyone on the boards (me included) thought ken was going to get destoried only to see him either win both or split with both those guys coming back to update the boards of him being really good. And items being on, I remembered but forgot to include in the actual post but is something certainly worth mentioning.
Hey JV,

I'm not 100% on how much were the initial money matches, but basically Matt's crew came down to SoCal to play the gamesquare national champion (Ken) and his brother (Mana). It was suppose to be enough money to cover their transportation, Ken won all his matches but Mana ended up losing his matches (so a split occured).

Ken's only background was him winning his local video game store tournament so nobody thought he could pull it off. Shortly after I played Ken for the first time at WhiteRob's house (Matt's crew friend) and saw it for myself lol I was convinced. For those interested, the initial hyped money match is on youtube (with items on of course), Ken vs. Sam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQGbwERf4eA


All of this is documented in one of the threads I linked before ;X

Also are MattDeezie and MattDotZeb two different people? I cannot remember.
Those links don't work for me for some reason, I get an error of "No thread specified" and Matt only had his original account.
 

Vyse

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Those links don't work for me for some reason, I get an error of "No thread specified" and Matt only had his original account.
Like I said, those threads have been archived along with everything pre-2008 I think.
But it's definitely one of those threads.
 
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