Super Smash Bros. in esports
[1][2] No official governing body or tournament circuit exists for professional Smash Bros., a byproduct of Nintendo's historical reluctance to directly promote the scene.
[4] On March 1, 2003, the International Video Game Federation hosted the first corporate sponsored Super Smash Bros. tournament, the IVGF Northwest Regionals, won by Jeremy "Recipherus" Fremlin.
[5] Ken Hoang was widely considered to be the best player in the world during this period, earning him the nickname "The King of Smash".
Melee was also included in Evolution Championship Series (EVO) 2007, an annual major fighting game tournament held in Las Vegas.
MLG dropped Melee from its circuit in 2007, however the organization still sponsored a number of tournaments as part of the underground 2007 Smash Series for a year.
The competitive scene was also further popularized by the 2013 release of The Smash Brothers documentary series directed by Travis "Samox" Beauchamp.
[11] This period saw a number of new and revived major tournament series enter the scene, including GENESIS, Super Smash Con, Community Effort Orlando (CEO), DreamHack, Major League Gaming (MLG), Shine and the Smash Summit invitational series.
[14] Smash Sisters, an initiative aimed at normalizing the participation of women at tournaments, held its first all-women bracket at GENESIS 3 in 2016.
[21] Referred to by some as "The Chaos Age", the current era has seen the relative decline of the "Five Gods" in tournament placings in favor of newer players, such as Zain Naghmi, Jeffrey "Axe" Williamson and Cody Schwab.
However, a major milestone occurred in the summer of 2020 with the development of rollback netcode for Project Slippi, an emulated fan-made modification of Melee, which allowed for low-latency online matchmaking for the first time in the game's history.
[23] While significantly contributing to the game's accessibility during the pandemic, Project Slippi also brought new legal troubles to the competitive scene, culminating in the cancellation of The Big House 10 in 2020 after the event received a cease and desist notice from Nintendo concerning the event's planned usage of Project Slippi.
[24] The cancellation was met with a highly negative reaction from the competitive community, and led to the trending of the "#FreeMelee" hashtag on Twitter.
[1] However, in November 2021, Nintendo and Panda jointly announced the first officially licensed Smash Bros. tournament circuit for North America in 2022.
[37] A separate grassroots tournament global circuit, the Smash World Tour, ran throughout 2022, with the finals expected to take place in December 2022.
However, legal action from Nintendo and potential sabotage from Panda Global resulted in the finals being cancelled just 3 weeks before their scheduled date.
[40][41] The competitive discontent with Brawl later spurred the development of Project M/Project+, an emulated fan mod to make the game's gameplay more resemble that of Melee's.
[citation needed] Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé defended Nintendo's history of distancing itself from the competitive community, saying that "We want to do this much more at a grassroots level than others’ visions around leagues and big up-front payments and things of that nature.”[43] Games played using competitive rules are generally played with lives (known as "stocks" in-game), with the timer set, and items turned off.
Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma is a notable user of the gentlemen's clause in competitive Melee, as he will often offer to gentleman to Battlefield, rather than to play on Fountain of Dreams, one of the games less popular stages.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U adds an 8-player mode, which allows triples and quadruples teams, although there have been comparatively few such tournaments.
"Wombo Combo" is an Internet meme from a December 2008 Melee doubles match that took place at the SCSA West Coast Circuit tournament.
The match featured Jeff "SilentSpectre" Leung and Mitchell Tang on one team and Julian Zhu and Joey "Lucky" Aldama on the other.
In the match, as Lucky lost all of his lives, SilentSpectre and Tang then performed several moves quickly in tandem, removing Zhu's ability to respond.
The commentators of the match – Brandon "HomeMadeWaffles" Collier, Phil DeBerry, and Joseph "Mang0" Marquez – exclaimed "Happy Feet, Wombo Combo.
[52] In July 2020, several high-profile members of the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, including top players and commentators, were accused of various forms of sexual misconduct.
Nintendo released a statement responding to the allegations, condemning "all acts of violence, harassment, and exploitation against anyone" and saying "we stand with the victims".
