Everyone and their grandmother knows about “Super Smash Bros”, and the latest game in the series, “Super Smash Bros Ultimate”. It is the best selling fighting game of all time by a long shot with under 36 million sales globally. The game sees icons of gaming, such as Mario and Pikachu, clash head to head in fights against each other.
One particular entry in the franchise remains an enigma, still being played today despite having only 26 playable characters to the most recent releases 89. That game is “Super Smash Bros Melee” for the Nintendo Gamecube.
Why is it still played?
Why would a 23-year-old game with fewer characters and worse graphics still have people playing when there are alternatives with more characters and better graphics?
Many players of the game would explain the near-limitless skill ceiling of the game as the reason for its longevity. While the game does have a group of characters that can be called “the best” -Fox, Jigglypuff, Falco, and Marth- there is still hope for many characters once thought to be bad.
Characters like Yoshi and Donkey Kong, who were once thought to be some of the worst in the game, have seen resurgences in the past few years by players looking deep into what they can do and optimizing the character. The most prominent example of this would include the player aMSa single-handedly taking Yoshi from a bottom tier to debatably a top 5 character in the game.
Another reason that people still stick around is the speed of the game. The gameplay is so fast that when optimized, the game looks like it was sped up. To some the game was too fast.
After seeing how high the skill ceiling for the game was, Nintendo made the movement slower in future iterations to limit this. Future installments have seen characters significantly reduced running speed, have less control in the air, and even randomly trip when they run too much in one game.
To this day, “Melee” remains the only game in the franchise with such freeform movement.
Competitive Rules
To anyone who’s never played in a competitive ruleset before, it might sound weird. The competitive ruleset changes the mode to 1 on 1 fights with 4 lives, bans 20 of the game’s 29 stages, and turns off all items. This might sound confusing, but all of this is to ensure fairness. Items introduce an element of randomness into fights that are trying to be expressions of pure skill, and the stages that were banned will often have gimmicks that will interrupt the flow of the whole match or allow for strategies that give an unfair advantage to certain characters.
The Era of the 5 Gods
Every competitive scene has its shining stars, such as Michael Jordan in basketball or Tom Brady in football. “Melee” is no exception in this field. There was a point of time in the game’s long history where it saw domination at almost every tournament by just 5 players.
The 5 players were Mew2King, Mang0, Armada, Hungrybox, and PPMD. At any tournament that had at least one of these players present, it was a guarantee that one of these players would win 1st place. Their reign was so unstoppable that they were known as “The 5 Gods”.
This domination of the scene would last from around 2008 to 2018, when many of them started to retire. The only members of the 5 gods still competing are Hungrybox and Mang0.
The Future
Despite the absence of 3 of the 5 gods, the scene still has many new top competitors breathing life into it. These include aMSa, a Yoshi player from Japan, Zain, a Marth player from Virginia, and Leffen, a Fox player from Sweden. These players alongside others will continue to optimize the game and their strategies for many more years to come.
