This blog entry is a continuation of last week’s, Super Smash Brothers (Part 1). The last entry left off discussing competitive games and the potential that Super Smash Brothers had to be recognized as an “e-sport”.
The game was so popular and so much fun that many people put hours and hours into it, exploring every nuanced mechanic to improve at the game. They discovered that the engine of the game had unintentionally created an incredibly deep network of complex techniques and mechanics that could allow a player with enough skill to have near perfect control of their character. Members of the community discovered these techniques all on their own and shared their findings and opinions on forums, spreading the knowledge across the world for anyone who cared enough to look for it. With the advancement of these practices, local tournaments quickly changed from casual enjoyment of a fun game to a very serious and competitive battleground. The game that Nintendo had envisioned as a casual but exciting party game had taken a drastic turn, and began a sensation that has lasted for more than a decade. Over the course of its production history, Melee was the best-selling game for the Gamecube, selling more than 7 million copies. To put that in perspective, only 22 million Gamecubes were ever sold, meaning that almost 1/3 of all Gamecube owners played Super Smash Brothers. Almost no game on any system since has been so ubiquitous and so well-loved by its community.
In the mid-2000s, Melee was at its peak. It was part of the Major League Gaming circuit of games, meaning that it had an official, sponsored tournament schedule, and attracted thousands of players and spectators. Despite all of this success, though, the game received no attention from its creator, Nintendo. Instead of celebrating the happy accident that the game had become, the company chose to ignore the competitive aspect of the game, something it had never intended to create. Nintendo and Melee’s creator, Sakurai, were focused on Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the next entry in the Smash series. Most of the Smash community was thrilled to get a sequel to this most amazing of games, which would be on the brand-new and innovative Wii console. I myself was beyond excited; every day after school I would log onto the website and look at the new screenshsots and videos that were teased for the upcoming game, and I begged my parents for a Wii so that I could play it. I was only 12 when the game released in 2008, and to me, it was everything I had wanted. A new, higher resolution Smash Brothers with more characters, more items and stages – it seemed perfect. But for some reason, I found myself going back to Melee more and more often. There was just something about it that had failed to translate over to the sequel, and I couldn’t tell what it was.
As far as the professional community was concerned, Brawl caused a massive rift. Brawl was, in essence, a slap to the face of the entire competitive community. The game engine had been slowed down to a floaty, defensive game that was half the speed of the original. Melee was lauded for its speed, precision, and control; in Brawl, there were no combos, no advanced mechanics, and there was even a random chance for a character to simply trip and be totally unable to move. These may sound like minor points, but to people who played the game competitively, it was absolutely unacceptable. The community divided into three: those who went back to Melee, those who accused them of living in the past and tried to make Brawl the next big thing, and those who decided to fix what Brawl had done wrong by hacking into Brawl’s engine and essentially redesigning the core of Melee inside of Brawl.
Sorry; it happened again. I figured that rather than reading more than 1000 words about Super Smash Brothers that I would just split it again. Thanks for reading again and stay tuned for next week’s entry, which I promise will be the actual end of my posts about Super Smash Brothers!