A week ago, December 3rd, 2021, was the twentieth anniversary of the North America release of the video game Super Smash Bros Melee. Today is the second day of Smash Summit 12, an invitation tournament for Melee with sixteen invited players and a prize pool of $45,517. It’s not normal for a game to still get played competitively, twenty years after its release. There are a lot of reasons why Melee has stuck around for so long, even past its sequels, but most Melee fans would agree that it all comes down to the passion that people have for playing this game competitively, even though Nintendo itself has historically been resistant, rather than supportive, to that competitive scene.
I started following competitive Melee around the spring of 2015, and by then I had been a relatively outspoken sports unenthusiast for years. My friends and I had already seen the documentary about the early Melee competitive scene, and watching the best players playing the game made us want to try it too.
You see, Melee had what sports didn’t.
Melee was fast-paced and exciting, whereas football and soccer games were boring and slow, and other sports that I understood even less were confusing and incomprehensible.
Melee was a game I could play with my friends, not just watch. In between watching competitive sets we would play a few rounds and get excited to watch again, only to watch and get excited to play again.
Melee had these thrilling storylines to follow, which revolved around the individual players and their victories and defeats, even their rivalries with other players.
It didn’t even feel close. Melee had a magic about it that sports entirely failed to capture, even if I couldn’t entirely explain why at the time.
But some time in 2016 I watched this particularly insightful video essay about Melee, which included this line:
“[…] Before I knew it, I was ranting to anyone who would listen about the time Axe four-stocked Silent Wolf on FoD in under a minute with a mid-tier character by identically executing the same offstage edgeguard and … shit. I’m a sports fan. How did this happen?”
And it started to dawn on me. All the things I loved about Melee were actually also true of sports. In fact, they’re things that have been true about sports for centuries, presumably.
Of course sports are confusing if you don’t understand them, but if you know how to pay attention to the details, they are fast-paced and interesting. Melee is boring too if all you can see is two cartoonish characters flailing around on a screen. People do closely follow the storylines in sports—both teams and individual players—and people do play those same sports casually with their friends. I had just never been one of those people.
There are differences, sure, but at the core of it, all the reasons I love to watch Melee are the same sort of reasons people love to watch football, soccer, hockey, or any other sport, and I’ve come to understand that a lot better now (except golf. I still don’t like golf). I might not love the term, but technically speaking, Melee is an “e-sport.” So I probably should’ve known the whole time.
Philip Rienstra (‘21) majored in writing and music and has plans to pursue a career in publishing. They are a recovering music snob, a fruit juice enthusiast, and a big fan of the enneagram. They’re currently living in St. Paul with their spouse, Heidi.
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I love all the Smash renditions, but there is something so pure and perfected about Melee which makes it the best one for me. Thanks for alerting me that people still play it competitively. Your post *may* have led me to procrastinate on Twitch yesterday for three hours watching Smash Summit round robin battles instead of writing a paper…