In a time where video games are played competitively for money, a time where companies will hold massive tournaments for games like Valorant, Overwatch, Street Fighter, and League of Legends, it seems that a game that could’ve been one of the leading ESports in the community is constantly screwed over by it’s parent company. I am of course talking about Super Smash Bros, the fighting/party game created by Masahiro Sakurai and owned by Nintendo. The competitive scene of this game has had many ups and downs throughout its history, but one thing is certain; Nintendo doesn’t want it to be, or more specifically, Nintendo doesn’t want to admit it’s an ESport.
Super Smash Bros Melee, and the Birth of the Scene
The first game in the series to reach the status of “competitive” was Super Smash Bros Melee, which was the second installment of the series. The first competition was held by a man named Matt “Deezie” Dahlgren, who enthralled people into the tournament by bragging about how he was the best at Melee. The ruleset was very different from what it is now, which has no items allowed and limited stages. Over time, the standardized ruleset for the game became more and more developed over the years, which eventually led to its current ruleset. From 2003-2007, which is coined as the “Golden Age” of Melee, the game was featured in the Major League Gaming (MLG) Pro Circuit during this period. The game was still fairly new at the time, so many people were still holding small tournaments during the game’s relatively unknown state. However, 2008-2013 was a terrible time for the health of the game. For one thing, the game was dropped by MLG and EVO, two of the biggest fighting game tournaments in the world. As well as this, the game’s next inclusion in the series, Super Smash Bros Brawl, was released in that year. However, compared to Melee’s precise, fast, and sometimes insane gameplay, Brawl was a much slower game than Melee. The game felt like glue to many who played Melee for so many years. And Brawl was much less entertaining to watch compared to Melee. As a result of this, the community split into 2 parts: the ones who would stick to their guns and stay with Melee, and the ones who would move to the future with Brawl.
Melee and the Test of Time
From 2012 to 2013 both Melee and Brawl declined exponentially in popularity. The games saw an occasional major tournament, such as GENESIS and The Big House, but not much else. Things were bleak for the competitive scene, until EVO surprisingly picked up Melee at EVO 2013. From then until 2018, EVO would continue to host Melee tournaments, and then the game experienced a resurgence. The game is still running to this day, with many people continuing to develop the meta of the game as of right now. While the game is very popular with viewers, the game has been somewhat of a turn-off to new players. Many people have issues with the game not including any kind of buffer. Buffer is something the game does to make it feel better to play. If I tried to do one input, and then another, the last input would happen immediately after the first one finished. But in Melee, there is almost no buffer, which means that you have to be frame-perfect with every action that you do. As someone who played games like Brawl, Smash 4, and Ultimate, which have very generous buffer systems, it was very difficult to play a game where there is no buffer at all. Many people who wanted to play the game were immediately turned away from this, which isn’t great for an ESport, where it needs to grow to gain revenue. As well as the controller issues, the game just looks out of date. It is nothing like Brawl’s graphics and onwards, which also isn’t great for gaining an audience. But despite all of this, Melee continues to thrive. It always seems like Melee is fighting against time, in the game and in real life.
Smash Ultimate, and its Fight to Stand Out
On the other side of the Super Smash Bros coin, we have those who chose to stick to Brawl. Pretty soon after EVO had Brawl featured, the game was quickly dismissed in the scene as a poor sequel to its predecessor. This may have to do with the fact that one of the best Melee players in the world participated in the Brawl bracket, and lost in the grand finals against a 14-year-old kid who had never played Brawl before, who just happened to be there on a family vacation. Soon after, Smash 4, or Sm4sh, was released. The beginning of the game’s competitive scene started out pretty well, until the DLC for the game came out, and Bayonetta, who was the last character added, became the undisputed best character in the game, uncontested in every way. Things were looking bad for people who wanted to play a game that wasn’t Melee. Then, in 2018, Smash Ultimate, the series’ most recent installment, was released. The game was good for competitive play, it was very well balanced, and the characters were pretty fluid and viable for the most part. The Smash community finally got a game that could be competitively played that wasn’t Melee. But as time went on, the flaws of the game started to stick out. For one thing, what makes Melee different from the rest of the Smash Bros games is its blazing speeds. Since the game was so old, it was very easy to exploit it in such a way that the game was much more exciting and crazy to watch. Wavedashing, which is a common mechanic in Melee, is just one of the probably hundreds of ways to move around. But in Ultimate, it seems that all of these movement techniques were taken away, and replaced with… nothing. This was done in an effort to, according to the creator, Masahiro Sakurai: “make the game more accessible to new players.” The major flaw of this though, is that players who want to play the game competitively are screwed over by this, because, who wouldn’t want a less restrictive and more freeform game? The lack of movement options in Ultimate is lamented by players all over the world, as well as current top players. On top of that, the additional characters that were added to the game were also problems, the most notable one being Steve from Minecraft. He is very good in many ways, and is undoubtedly the best character in the game. So it almost feels like Ultimate, in many more ways than one, is overly simplistic, which is, in my opinion, the worst part of the game.
The Relationship with Nintendo
The competitive Smash Bros scene as a whole has been noted for its uneasy relationship with Nintendo, the series owner and publisher. According to IGN journalist Matt Kim states that: “Unlike companies like Riot or Blizzard, who work directly to manage the competitive scene built up around their games, Nintendo has studiously distanced itself, and even actively worked against a community that loves its fighting games.” Nintendo usually tries to prevent tournaments from happening by threatening legal action against these big tournaments, like EVO 2013, often over live streaming rights or due to the use of mods, like Project Slippi, a community-made modification to Melee where people can play it online. While Nintendo has sponsored some community-organized tournaments and has held its own promotional tournaments, Nintendo has never contributed any money to a prize pot. As a result, most tournaments are made from the ground up by people in the community. And since Nintendo actively works against the community, the game has never reached its full potential to be a top ESports game.
For the Love of the Game
The Smash Bros community has faced a lot of challenges in the past and is still dealing with many problems today. Compared to other ESports, it’s very difficult to make a living playing this video game compared to others, since payouts are much smaller than that of official events organized by the owner of the game. For example, GENESIS 9, one of the most prestigious and largest events the scene has to offer, only had an $18,225 prize pool. The winner of that event only won $7,290, which may sound like a lot to someone who doesn’t play video games for a living, but as a job, this is very little compared to games like Overwatch, with very large prize pools. But despite the disconnect in the community, the disadvantages of playing a 20+-year-old game, the oversimplicity of Ultimate, and Nintendo being discontent with the game’s competitive scene as a whole, the game persists in being a very popular ESport. The game has a total of 1,046,730 hours of gameplay watched on Twitch alone, which isn’t exactly a trait of a dead series. The community continues to thrive, through the ups and downs. It is truly beautiful to see a game that is supported only by its community and to see it succeed in its journey to becoming a relevant ESport. The cool part is that our school has a Super Smash Bros Ultimate ESports team. There isn’t a Melee ESports team yet, but with enough support, we can take both of these amazing games that so many know and love and take them to the next level. And by doing so, we can contribute to the game’s success, which, as we’ve seen, is heavily deserved, because of the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into making the competitive scene it is today.
UPDATE: October 25th, 2023
On October 24th of this year, Nintendo released a list of Community Guidelines to how tournaments that feature their games must operate. The entire article can be found here: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433/~/community-tournament-guidelines. (This link doesn’t work on school computers.) Now there is a lot to talk about in this, but the basic thing is this: This once again shows that Nintendo does not wish for Smash Bros to be a competitive ESport. For one thing, a major tournament in Smash Bros can have as few as 200 to 2000 competitors. But Nintendo has said that this will be limited to 200. This will absolutely have a negative impact on the scene as a whole. Some people are hopeless, and believe that their favorite game will be destroyed competitively. Others, like Smash Bros Melee’s own Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma, who runs one of the largest weekly online tournaments in the world for Ultimate, said on Twitter: “I’m gonna keep running Coinbox, (name of the weekly online tournament he runs), I’m gonna keep running it in January, I’m gonna keep running it February, in March, in April, I will run it every [expletive] week, until I receive word from them directly. I won’t stop out of fear.” He plans to run it, thinking that Nintendo is “bluffing”. This topic is very large, so I recommend you go to the link I shared earlier. In any case, this only tightens the already harsh relationship between Competitive Smash Bros players and Nintendo