Smashing friends in Slidell: Smash melee (Part 2)

This is a community of warriors, who were once referred to by the creator of the game as a “group of fanatical players” who he felt would ruin the game he made to be a party brawler. There are many things that bring people into the melee community—nostalgia, friends, or a love of the game—but all the players have fought to keep this game alive and thriving.

The Smash community of Slidell is no different. Our play group fights to keep the game alive and well as best we can. I originally began playing at a local gaming shop with some other guys. Eventually, Mikey Willman, a 24 year old loan officer, decided to host tournaments at his house.

What are they doing? In most traditional Interactive fighting games, the player has a set amount of hit points at the beginning of a match, and if those hit points reach zero, the character faints or dies and the round is over. Instead of starting with a certain amount of hit points and losing them, in Super Smash Bros. you start at 0% and work your way up. The higher your percentage is (which doesn’t correlate to any real percentage and goes up to 999%), the further you can get knocked back when hit by attacks, which will eventually send you off the stage and hurtling toward your doom if you cannot recover. Falling off the stage removes a stock from your character and if you run out of stocks you lose. Photo by Vincent Delucca

Like other fighting games, there is a neutral game in Super Smash Bros. (when the player is setting up combos and attacks) and a combo game (a series of consecutive hits that cannot be avoided or are difficult to avoid), but there is also the ledge game, in which players try to prevent their opponent from reaching the ledge after being knocked off the stage. Because of this third phase of the game, a much larger emphasis is placed on jumping, juggling, or continually hitting your opponent up in the air, and on gimping, taking someone’s stock at a low percentage. There are also no “secret combos” in Super Smash Bros. or the ability to press a combination of buttons like down, left, A, B, B, A to pull off a special attack. Therefore, the game seems a lot simpler than other fighting games because every attack is easily performed by even the newest of players. The game is based on the physics and the ledges that makes it unique. It leads to a lot of physics exploits that, when used properly, can beat someone not aware of how to exploit them.

Vincent: Who got you into playing Super Smash Brothers Melee?

Mike: My best friend, John, in Florida. Me and him played a lot when it first came out.

Vincent: When did you start playing?

Mike: Basically from the start. Back in 2001, I didn’t have a Gamecube, but John did. We would go to his house after school and play until I had to go home. We would spend almost all our free time playing.

Vincent:Where did you play?

Mike: Mostly at John’s house but we also played at out local game shop, Mega Gaming and Comics. I met a lot of friends I still keep in touch with today.

Vincent: Why did you play?

Mike: Mainly because all my friends played. Looking back, though, it also helped me cope with my parents going through their divorce. It was hard on me, but playing Smash with my friends helped a lot throughout the process.

Vincent: What made Smash Brothers such a good outlet for you when you were going through that?

Mike: It helped me to forget about the outside world. While I was playing I was getting better with my friends and it helped me to dream of getting even better, and eventually win regional tournaments.

Vincent: Did you ever play in the bigger tournaments?

Mike: Sadly, I didn’t. I kinda fell off when I moved to Louisiana with my mom. I didn’t know many people there and I was kinda quiet and shy and started to focus more on theater and school than anything else.

Vincent: What got you playing again after you moved to Slidell?

Mike: I started playing video games at a local game store called Level-Up. We started originally playing at lock-ins and it got really competitive really quickly. I think I was probably the best ones there, but the other guys who played got good really quickly.

Vincent: What happened after that?

Mike: We started practicing at my house and started really practicing the advanced tech and eventually started holding tournaments at my house. At first they were really small but eventually it grew into tournaments with twenty or more people.

Uncommon surroundings aren’t unusual for tournament players. Photo by Vincent Delucca.

As you can imagine, it started to get cramped fairly quickly as the community grew, but at least it was growing. At a certain point, we had to find a new venue because the house was cramped and hot. Mikey, our friends Jasper and Nicky, and I ended up getting together to find a better venue. We settled on moving the tournaments to a church recreational hall at St. John of the Cross in Lacombe. At first a lot of players complained about the drive and location and even more complained about the fact we had to pay a venue fee to play. At the end of the day, it was the best we could do, and the because it was at a church, we started called playing Smash “going to church.”

It was fitting because if the community of melee could be compared to anything it would be a religion. Many people compare it to being a fan of a sports team. At a tournament, you play in one-on-one matches versus your opponent. At first, there usually are not too many people watching your games, but the longer you win in the tournament the more people start watching. This culminates in the finals, where everyone who in not playing is usually watching and cheering for their favorite player.

There are legends such as Sepiroth Ken, a player who was the hands down best player of the game from 2004 to 2007 and his partner, Isai, who by many was considered equally as good, but only when he felt like trying. There are the Five Gods who, between them, have won every major tournament in the last five years. There are even villains such as the so-called “God Slayer,” named for being the only person to ever beat all five of the gods. People worship the game and its players and watch their favorite players online whenever they can. They sit and practice “tech skill” or the mechanics of the game which have been perfected to 1/60th of a second over and over again.

Part 3: Tech skill

Editor’s Note: This story is one of a series reprinted from the book A Guide to South Louisiana: Stories of Uncommon Culture. Each author was a student in Rachel Breunlin’s “Storytelling and Culture” course for the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 2017. The Neighborhood Story Project sponsored the project as part of its mission to publish collaborative ethnography in high quality books in which the authors receive royalties for their creative labor.