Loyalty is king: How dedication revitalised a game
By Adam McDonald
Nintendo has a very serious competitive scene.
The previous game was a hit. There is not really another term that does 5.5m units shifted the justice that deserves.
Nintendo, knowing that a sequel to Super Smash Bros could be both the launching pad for a hugely successful series of games and a launch title for their new console, the GameCube, immediately greenlit a sequel.
After a torturous development cycle that left employees exhausted Super Smash Bros Melee would release to the world, immediately finding itself a success.
Melee became the console’s bestseller, being described as “tight” and “fluid” by reviewers and fans alike and would be considered a rousing success, and it’d go onto be immortalised as a classic, an all-time fun game for the family to play.
Except, Melee didn’t live in memory. As soon as teenagers across the world began discovering that the game’s physics were, for lack of a better term, wonky. Players were discovering that you could recover from moves twice as quickly, that you could run backwards, slide across the floor and platforms and so on.
Not even two years after release, the community was holding professional tournaments all over the globe, with Sweden, Germany, Japan, America, Canada and the United Kingdom hosting the majority of events.
After another four years, Melee was confronted with the release of a new Smash game: Brawl. Brawl promised to be twice as good, twice as big, a cinematic story and even other icons, like Sonic the Hedgehog.
For the UK, this change just about killed the local scene.
Top British players, who found themselves isolated from the competition, struggled to adapt to Brawl, and found Melee harder to improve at, as content and general viewership plummeted.
For about two years, the UK’s ‘Heir’ tournament series were put on hiatus. Top players would travel abroad to tournaments from time to time, but this was rare. Most of the UK scene managed to recover by 2015, but Scotland remained as an outlier.
Scotland had stayed defiant in the switch between games, with the same tight-knit group of friends running tournaments throughout the community’s most dire attendance numbers.
It took years for the Scottish Melee scene to really gain footing. A tournament organiser, Paul, said on the matter: “We’d always known that the game was quite niche.
“Just by playing a Nintendo game competitively, you’re only going to attract a small number of likeminded people.”
Paul is correct on the community being likeminded; most of the players are incredibly hardcore when it comes to fighting games, and it’s not uncommon to see even sub-par Melee players excel at other games in the genre. An example of this is Leffen, one of the best European melee players ever, who has won big-money tournaments in two other popular fighting games.
This like-mindedness doesn’t necessarily translate to event turnouts, though. Jordan “Melvo” Melville, a local player, said: “The last tournament before COVD, there was 4 people (including me) there. The game was in a bit of a dire state, to be honest.”
To most in the scene, COVID seemed like the nail in the coffin. A game that required bulky CRT TVs and a decades-old console would’ve been made hard enough to play, but the lack of good online emulation made it nearly impossible.
In June 2020, those fears were somewhat dashed by Slippi, an online emulator that replicated the local experience near-perfectly and, as if by sheer luck, a Melee-themed Discord chat had been made the week before COVID-19.
Seemingly, the scene had accidentally resurrected itself. When asked on this, Jordan said: “I’ve played the game since I was dead young for fun, and I honestly thought it was on death’s door for weeks. Seeing ten people on a voice call, talking and playing like it was 2015 again, was both weird and refreshing.”
During COVID-19, the addition of multiplayer allowed for online-only tournaments to be hosted with cash prizes. These tournaments went from a “special one-off” to a monthly occasion, and when the COVID rules were eventually lifted, organisers got to setting up in-person tournaments.
This newfound sense of community has lasted, steadily attracting new players (and hosts). When asked on the scene, community member and Falkirk/Stirling tournament organiser, “SuperSamCraft”, said: “I’ve always been interested in the Melee scene, and when I joined this community just over a year ago, I knew I’d made a good choice. I’ve found that the people here are welcoming and genuinely care about helping me get better at a game I love. I’ve had far more people sign up to my first tournament, Christmas Clash, than I could’ve imagined. I’ve only had love and support from this scene.”