With the Metagame Documentary just being released, it shows a great inside into the stories and upbringings of melee's greatest. Something I've always wanted to do is document my own history with melee, and thought "why not open this to other people as well?"
So I want to hear about your personal history with the game! Tell us about how you got introduced to the game, first tournaments, any fun stories, big wins, any history with TOing, streaming, or stuff that shows your story with the game.
I want to read through all of your stories and reply to them, but more importantly, documenting and reminiscing back on old smash memories is such a fun thing to do, so I highly advise you guys to give it a shot.
I had completely forgotten about this until a few years ago when a buddy of mine was talking about these Play N Trade events, and I remembered that I had entered one once.
Flash forward about 2 years later, and I get into speedrunning. I already had the established hobby of retro gaming at that point, growing up with a Sega Genesis and loving all the games. I was playing games like Kirby's Dream Land and Pokemon Red on an emulator, just learning the route and trying to get fast times. It was one of my first communities I participated in, as I would hang out on Twitch, race on SpeedRunsLive, and even stream sometimes. I always love bringing up the fact that I was streaming on Twitch back in like 2014. Anyways, obviously one of the most popular speedrunners at that time was Narcissa, who I would watch playing Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, all that good stuff. It was one day I was going through her Youtube videos and I saw a video called "Melee Introduction". Honestly, if you're a complete casual and just want to learn the most basic tech, then the video is still pretty good to watch. But I was briefly inspired by this, so I booted up my stream, titled it like "I'm a scrub. Let's fix that" or something lame like that. Having no understanding of tier lists, not watching any tournament videos, I picked Mewtwo, because I thought he looked the most threatening. I then spent the next 30 minutes L cancelling, wavedashing, and hopelessly looking for a melee Mewtwo youtube video (I could only find Smash 4 ones) so I turned the stream off.
So another year passes, and I didn't touch melee at all. I still was decently active in the speedrun scene, mainly a fan of Pokemon speedruns. I was in my choir class when out of the blue, a friend of mine started talking about smash. I can't remember if the conversation started with melee, or if it was Smash 4 then moved to Melee. Either way, I expressed that I had a bit of interest playing the game but never got anywhere with it. A few months pass, well into summer break, and he texts me, inviting to watch melee @ Evo 2015 at his place. He invited a few friends over to watch this big tournament. Throughout watching it, I had to ask about the tournament format, info on all the players, since I honestly had no idea. My friend had been watching the game for a little while now, so he could answer it all. For my first tournament experience, I got to watch Plup Vs. Leffen, Hbox's most campiest set vs Mango, and the beginning of Armada's dominance. That's what I needed. All these previous attempts to get into smash failed because I wasn't getting the full smash fan experience. But now, I was hooked. Over that weekend, I had my friend tell me about the tier list, and as he walked through each character, he stated who the pros were of that character. He made it all the way down to Pichu, and was like "I don't actually think anyone plays Pichu." so I foolishly was like "That'll be me. I'll play Pichu."
My friend was so much better than me that we didn't end up playing too many friendlies. What I needed to do was just sit in my room and practice playing the game, and so every so often, that's what I did. I didn't know about Smashboards and looking up playing characters, so I just sat in my room playing Pichu against CPU's. I wouldn't stream these, but I pointed my camera at my tiny CRT and would record these learning sessions. I wish I still had that footage because it would've been so adorable. I remember learning that Pichu could full hop nair someone, then double jump bair back and hit them again, and I thought "That's my strategy. I'm gonna run at them and nair, then back air immediately at them again. They won't be able to handle it." Well, a few months later I would be able to test this strategy, since a local card shop about 15 minutes away was gonna start hosting melee tournaments.
I show up, never been to this place before, and was a bit nervous. Only 10 people were at this event, and as you would expect, especially playing Pichu, I got mollywhopped. I still have the Challonge link here (I'm under "Henry" this tournament was so casual we just used our names instead of tags). I even lost to someone playing Bowser. Not like someone who was so good they were just messing around with Bowser, like some other crappy player playing Bowser. I was 15 at the time, didn't have a license, and I had somewhat strict parents who didn't want to drive me all the time, so I was going to these tournaments every few weeks or so. In that time, I finally started playing top tiers, switching to Marth, then Falco, then Fox. Once, my school randomly hosted a melee tournament at their "Smash Club" (It was mainly for Smash 4) and I went there and took a best of 1 set off of someone who said they were also a melee player. That was my first ever set win, which was cool. I wasn't good at the game, but I was understanding how to play, and that was cool. I never won one of these tournaments, not even close, but it was a great time learning about the game and hanging with smashers.
But this tournament was so casual. There were some weeks where literally 2 people showed up. So I posted about it on Smashboards that next summer, on this thread here. At the same time, I used the equipment and knowledge from streaming speedruns to broadcast our events! The smashboards post mainly brought in Smash 4 players, which the weekly also hosted, but I think it was the start of having Chicagoland Melee players show up as well. Throughout that year we had our melee entrants go up to about 20, which although isn't huge, was big for our tiny weekly. Players like Captain Faceroll and ORLY showed up sometimes, and it felt cool to be partially responsible for getting the word out. I remember after we were doing decent, one of my favorite memories was playing doubles one week. Sveet showed up and he picked a random person to be his doubles partner. That was me, and we made it to grands, playing against Hindawg and his brother, who barely knew how to play. I'm pretty sure we even beat them in Winner's Finals. It was really just Sveet vs Hindawg and then me vs his brother, but it was still such a cool experience. I managed to get a double knee at some point and felt so cool. We ended up getting 2nd and I made 5 bucks, feeling so sick that I made money playing smash. The entry fee for doubles was 5 bucks so in reality I didn't make any money, but who cares.
Also in 2016 was my first big tournament experience: Combo Breaker. I could talk about Combo Breaker for days and days man. If you're a smash fan and don't know crap about fighting games, like I did, then I highly recommend you check out this tournament when it comes back. It was only about 20 minutes away from where I lived, unlike the next closest big tourney, The Big House, which was many hours. All these faces I had seen on streams of melee are there in the flesh, it was so cool! One of my fondest memories at this specific Combo Breaker was at doubles. We were all in a big circle having a smash conversation when someone asks Juggleguy, "Hey, is Kongo Jungle legal in doubles?" to which Juggleguy responds "Sure, what the hell!" and so Combo Breaker melee doubles had Kongo Jungle legal, as you can see here. I entered doubles with the same friend who got me into melee, him playing Jigglypuff and me playing Fox. And yes, we won our only set in losers by counterpicking our opponent to Kongo Jungle. It was glorious. I returned to Combo Breaker every year, even after Melee was dropped from the main lineup and made a side event. I didn't even enter every year, just the whole tournament experience was so worth showing up, even as a spectator.
I'd say throughout 2017 I slowly stopped going to melee tourneys and being active in the scene. As you can see I wasn't a big competitive success, and much more important things like going to college, getting my first job, and all that was getting in the way. So I stopped going to the weeklies and stuff. I still watched all the major tourneys, I just wasn't playing. I would have spurts of about a few weeks getting into the game, maybe playing netplay for a bit, but I never got too hooked. I didn't mention this, but I never really had a solid character I played and got good at. I was just mediocre with a bunch of them. I'm not joking when I say, in the few amount of tourneys I've actually entered, here are the characters I've played. And bear in mind, I wasn't sandbagging in any of these. I was trying with these characters.
A few years go by with this occasional playing. I'm at college, not knowing anyone, so I never played in person. That is, until my second year, when I transferred schools. There were flyers advertising a smash club, and not thinking too much about it, I looked it up. You had to go to their Facebook page to learn about the weeklies, and in my act of defiance against Mark Zuckerberg, I didn't have a Facebook account. So by some other way I can't remember, I eventually figured out when and where these melee weeklies were. So super nervous, in a new college town, I show up to a random classroom at like 7 pm, and sure enough, people are playing melee. These events were pretty dang cool, but it wasn't enough to really get me back into that super invested in the smash scene. So I went to about 2 or 3 of these tourneys while on a few week melee binge. Here's a bracket from that. Guess which out of my previous characters stated I played in this tourney? It was Zelda! I think it's kinda cool that the video that was my first glimpse into melee was by a Zelda player, and now it's the character I was playing.
I'd like to think I would attend more of those tourneys if it wasn't for COVID. I'm still going to school here, but obviously no melee events are being held, at least not in person. The only online event I think I participated in was Ryobeat's Minneapolis Charity Netplay Event since it was for a good cause. I went 0-2 I'm pretty sure lol, playing Pikachu.
For now, I'm still on and off again playing melee, but I'm always keeping up watching smash tournaments. Over the past few days I've been learning how to play Peach and playing Slippi Unranked, and it's been a very fun (but frustrating!!!!!) time! I don't know what my future holds with melee. I could keep playing Peach and become super sick, or never enter another tourney again. But no matter what I don't think I'll ever stop loving smash and enjoying the community.
So I want to hear about your personal history with the game! Tell us about how you got introduced to the game, first tournaments, any fun stories, big wins, any history with TOing, streaming, or stuff that shows your story with the game.
I want to read through all of your stories and reply to them, but more importantly, documenting and reminiscing back on old smash memories is such a fun thing to do, so I highly advise you guys to give it a shot.
MY STORY
The funniest thing is that my start to competitive smash was a Brawl tournament at a local Play N Trade in like 2012. I lived like a block away from this game store and signed up for it on a whim. I played Brawl casually with my brother a lot. When I mean casual, I mean Wii remote sideways casual. I went Lucas at the tourney and didn't take a game. I hear a lot about smashers' stories when they first see that people are a lot better than them, and how it fires them up to want to learn and get better. That didn't happen for 12 year old me lol. I just thought they were nerds and didn't enter another tourney.I had completely forgotten about this until a few years ago when a buddy of mine was talking about these Play N Trade events, and I remembered that I had entered one once.
Flash forward about 2 years later, and I get into speedrunning. I already had the established hobby of retro gaming at that point, growing up with a Sega Genesis and loving all the games. I was playing games like Kirby's Dream Land and Pokemon Red on an emulator, just learning the route and trying to get fast times. It was one of my first communities I participated in, as I would hang out on Twitch, race on SpeedRunsLive, and even stream sometimes. I always love bringing up the fact that I was streaming on Twitch back in like 2014. Anyways, obviously one of the most popular speedrunners at that time was Narcissa, who I would watch playing Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, all that good stuff. It was one day I was going through her Youtube videos and I saw a video called "Melee Introduction". Honestly, if you're a complete casual and just want to learn the most basic tech, then the video is still pretty good to watch. But I was briefly inspired by this, so I booted up my stream, titled it like "I'm a scrub. Let's fix that" or something lame like that. Having no understanding of tier lists, not watching any tournament videos, I picked Mewtwo, because I thought he looked the most threatening. I then spent the next 30 minutes L cancelling, wavedashing, and hopelessly looking for a melee Mewtwo youtube video (I could only find Smash 4 ones) so I turned the stream off.
So another year passes, and I didn't touch melee at all. I still was decently active in the speedrun scene, mainly a fan of Pokemon speedruns. I was in my choir class when out of the blue, a friend of mine started talking about smash. I can't remember if the conversation started with melee, or if it was Smash 4 then moved to Melee. Either way, I expressed that I had a bit of interest playing the game but never got anywhere with it. A few months pass, well into summer break, and he texts me, inviting to watch melee @ Evo 2015 at his place. He invited a few friends over to watch this big tournament. Throughout watching it, I had to ask about the tournament format, info on all the players, since I honestly had no idea. My friend had been watching the game for a little while now, so he could answer it all. For my first tournament experience, I got to watch Plup Vs. Leffen, Hbox's most campiest set vs Mango, and the beginning of Armada's dominance. That's what I needed. All these previous attempts to get into smash failed because I wasn't getting the full smash fan experience. But now, I was hooked. Over that weekend, I had my friend tell me about the tier list, and as he walked through each character, he stated who the pros were of that character. He made it all the way down to Pichu, and was like "I don't actually think anyone plays Pichu." so I foolishly was like "That'll be me. I'll play Pichu."
My friend was so much better than me that we didn't end up playing too many friendlies. What I needed to do was just sit in my room and practice playing the game, and so every so often, that's what I did. I didn't know about Smashboards and looking up playing characters, so I just sat in my room playing Pichu against CPU's. I wouldn't stream these, but I pointed my camera at my tiny CRT and would record these learning sessions. I wish I still had that footage because it would've been so adorable. I remember learning that Pichu could full hop nair someone, then double jump bair back and hit them again, and I thought "That's my strategy. I'm gonna run at them and nair, then back air immediately at them again. They won't be able to handle it." Well, a few months later I would be able to test this strategy, since a local card shop about 15 minutes away was gonna start hosting melee tournaments.
I show up, never been to this place before, and was a bit nervous. Only 10 people were at this event, and as you would expect, especially playing Pichu, I got mollywhopped. I still have the Challonge link here (I'm under "Henry" this tournament was so casual we just used our names instead of tags). I even lost to someone playing Bowser. Not like someone who was so good they were just messing around with Bowser, like some other crappy player playing Bowser. I was 15 at the time, didn't have a license, and I had somewhat strict parents who didn't want to drive me all the time, so I was going to these tournaments every few weeks or so. In that time, I finally started playing top tiers, switching to Marth, then Falco, then Fox. Once, my school randomly hosted a melee tournament at their "Smash Club" (It was mainly for Smash 4) and I went there and took a best of 1 set off of someone who said they were also a melee player. That was my first ever set win, which was cool. I wasn't good at the game, but I was understanding how to play, and that was cool. I never won one of these tournaments, not even close, but it was a great time learning about the game and hanging with smashers.
But this tournament was so casual. There were some weeks where literally 2 people showed up. So I posted about it on Smashboards that next summer, on this thread here. At the same time, I used the equipment and knowledge from streaming speedruns to broadcast our events! The smashboards post mainly brought in Smash 4 players, which the weekly also hosted, but I think it was the start of having Chicagoland Melee players show up as well. Throughout that year we had our melee entrants go up to about 20, which although isn't huge, was big for our tiny weekly. Players like Captain Faceroll and ORLY showed up sometimes, and it felt cool to be partially responsible for getting the word out. I remember after we were doing decent, one of my favorite memories was playing doubles one week. Sveet showed up and he picked a random person to be his doubles partner. That was me, and we made it to grands, playing against Hindawg and his brother, who barely knew how to play. I'm pretty sure we even beat them in Winner's Finals. It was really just Sveet vs Hindawg and then me vs his brother, but it was still such a cool experience. I managed to get a double knee at some point and felt so cool. We ended up getting 2nd and I made 5 bucks, feeling so sick that I made money playing smash. The entry fee for doubles was 5 bucks so in reality I didn't make any money, but who cares.
Also in 2016 was my first big tournament experience: Combo Breaker. I could talk about Combo Breaker for days and days man. If you're a smash fan and don't know crap about fighting games, like I did, then I highly recommend you check out this tournament when it comes back. It was only about 20 minutes away from where I lived, unlike the next closest big tourney, The Big House, which was many hours. All these faces I had seen on streams of melee are there in the flesh, it was so cool! One of my fondest memories at this specific Combo Breaker was at doubles. We were all in a big circle having a smash conversation when someone asks Juggleguy, "Hey, is Kongo Jungle legal in doubles?" to which Juggleguy responds "Sure, what the hell!" and so Combo Breaker melee doubles had Kongo Jungle legal, as you can see here. I entered doubles with the same friend who got me into melee, him playing Jigglypuff and me playing Fox. And yes, we won our only set in losers by counterpicking our opponent to Kongo Jungle. It was glorious. I returned to Combo Breaker every year, even after Melee was dropped from the main lineup and made a side event. I didn't even enter every year, just the whole tournament experience was so worth showing up, even as a spectator.
I'd say throughout 2017 I slowly stopped going to melee tourneys and being active in the scene. As you can see I wasn't a big competitive success, and much more important things like going to college, getting my first job, and all that was getting in the way. So I stopped going to the weeklies and stuff. I still watched all the major tourneys, I just wasn't playing. I would have spurts of about a few weeks getting into the game, maybe playing netplay for a bit, but I never got too hooked. I didn't mention this, but I never really had a solid character I played and got good at. I was just mediocre with a bunch of them. I'm not joking when I say, in the few amount of tourneys I've actually entered, here are the characters I've played. And bear in mind, I wasn't sandbagging in any of these. I was trying with these characters.
A few years go by with this occasional playing. I'm at college, not knowing anyone, so I never played in person. That is, until my second year, when I transferred schools. There were flyers advertising a smash club, and not thinking too much about it, I looked it up. You had to go to their Facebook page to learn about the weeklies, and in my act of defiance against Mark Zuckerberg, I didn't have a Facebook account. So by some other way I can't remember, I eventually figured out when and where these melee weeklies were. So super nervous, in a new college town, I show up to a random classroom at like 7 pm, and sure enough, people are playing melee. These events were pretty dang cool, but it wasn't enough to really get me back into that super invested in the smash scene. So I went to about 2 or 3 of these tourneys while on a few week melee binge. Here's a bracket from that. Guess which out of my previous characters stated I played in this tourney? It was Zelda! I think it's kinda cool that the video that was my first glimpse into melee was by a Zelda player, and now it's the character I was playing.
I'd like to think I would attend more of those tourneys if it wasn't for COVID. I'm still going to school here, but obviously no melee events are being held, at least not in person. The only online event I think I participated in was Ryobeat's Minneapolis Charity Netplay Event since it was for a good cause. I went 0-2 I'm pretty sure lol, playing Pikachu.
For now, I'm still on and off again playing melee, but I'm always keeping up watching smash tournaments. Over the past few days I've been learning how to play Peach and playing Slippi Unranked, and it's been a very fun (but frustrating!!!!!) time! I don't know what my future holds with melee. I could keep playing Peach and become super sick, or never enter another tourney again. But no matter what I don't think I'll ever stop loving smash and enjoying the community.
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