E-sports, also known as competitive gaming, is a thriving industry, albeit one surrounded by controversy regarding it’s authenticity as a sport. Supporters argue that a degree of dexterity, strategy, and focus is required, but others feel that the lack of actual physical mobility means it should not be a sport. Having said that, the culture surrounding e-sports is definitely one that mimics the high-intensity threshold of a football or basketball.
There are several different “types” of games related to e-sports.
Shooters:
Focus on athletes’ trigger–finger reflexes and ability to react in real-time to other players trying to gun you down, with games like Call of Duty and Counterstrike amongst its ranks.
MOBAs – Mobile Online Battle Arena:
Rely a thorough understanding of resource allocation and real-time tactics to bring your team to victory.
However there is one particular game within the fighting game genre which has seen “smash” success in the fighting game niche.
Super Smash Bros, a series originally released by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 console in 1999. has
developed a surprisingly strong competitive scene. The game features a variety of popular Nintendo characters from other franchises – Mario, Pikachu (Pokemon), Kirby (name of the title character in his own game) and Link (Legend of Zelda) are some of the many fighters featured – battling it out on a stage and attempting to force other players off the screen.
“It’s a change of pace, because basically every other 2D fighter-esque game, there’s a box and you walk back and forth in the box and have to take down their health.” said Jake Dingley, a former competitive Smash player. “The fact that it’s so much different, the concept of increasing the knockback, and hitting people causing a higher percentage of knockback, and then there’s ledges, and opportunities to kill people earlier. It makes the game much more interesting as a fighting game.”
The first game, now known as Smash 64 in the community, was successful commercially, selling 5.55 million units worldwide. However, it wasn’t until its sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee was released that it begun to develop its competitive following.
“There was a lot more passion and a lot more competitive aspect to it.” said Dingley. “Smash 64, a lot of people like, really enjoyed, but it didn’t actually become competitive and people didn’t become passionate about it until Melee.”
There have been four games released in the main series – known as Smash 64, Melee, Brawl, and Smash 4 – but Melee specifically still attracts new devotees even as it ages. Ryan Strenkowski, the President of TCNJ’s Competitive Gaming club, holds regular tournaments for games like Super Smash Bros.
“There’s things called wavedashing.” said Strenkowski. “What a wavedash is, normally you can use what’s called an air dodge. When you’re in the air, you can hold the right trigger or left trigger, and go left or right, and what that does, is if someone’s trying to attack, it would dodge. But what players found out, if you do an air-dodge into the ground, and you do it super fast, you can just kind of [do a[ slide technique, and when you slide you’re allowed to do other inputs on top of it. So basically it’s adding extra frames to do moves, like you just get more advanced techniques that way.”
This feature was not in Smash 64, which was relatively stripped down compared to its successors. As for future games, according to Strenkowski the developers made key changes to limit the ability of players to force the extra frames.
“In later games, they made it so air dodges don’t have any movement, like aerial movement, you just stay in the same place and you can spam it, it’s not a one time use,” said Strenkowski. “Later on in Brawl and Smash 4, they changed the engines so it made the games much more flow-ier, they took out a lot of combos, they took out a hit stun that led to combos.”
When asked for his opinion, Dingley corroborated what Strenkowski said.
“Melee has some much fluidity at a game, and it’s a much faster game.” said Dingley. “You can do more in the game, you have more control over your character, as compared to Smash 4 which is a much more stipped down and simplified version of Melee, so it’s harder to play competitively.”
With this in mind, the competitive community for Super Smash Brothers began to undergo a divide. A modified version of the Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the third entry of the series, was made by Smash fans to make Brawl perform more. Titled “Project M” it was an attempt to bridge the fans of the two series, but was struck down by Nintendo following the release of the fourth entry. The competitive community, at this point, plays either Melee or Smash 4.
“Both games have completely different communities,” said Strenkowski. “They’re both Smash games, they both play like Smash games, they’re similar, they’re casual, you get to play as Mario and beat up your friend who’s playing Pikachu, everyone knows that.”
“But the thing that separates the communities,” continued Strenkowski, “is Melee has been around for 16 years and it’s still growing, it’s still getting new people, you have to play it on a CRT, you have to play it on a Gamecube, all these old things you have to carry. And people are lovin it! And that’s because there’s a lot of depth within it, there’s a lot of advanced techniques.”
Of course, none of this would mean anything if not for the degree of popularity the game has enjoyed. For a series that features a short Italian plumber trading punches with a Medieval-era elven man, the amount of money thrown into the competitive scene is obscene. Tournaments are held fairly regularly, with cash prizes for both singles and doubles teams. The most recent of major tournament, Smash Summit Five, was hosted approximately two weeks ago and had a prize pool of of $80,000.
Simialrly, the current #1 ranked Smash player, Adam Lindgren – known by his handle Armada in the community, has amassed over $270,000 in prize money over the course of his career. For being really good at a game that, just to reiterate, came out 16 years ago. The hold of Super Smash Bros. Melee is incredible, and according to Strenkowski it’s growing to this day.
“Since 2013 and 2015, there were two booms in the Melee community that really added a lot of people.” said Strenkowski. “We started getting larger and larger tournaments, and from that our top players have been able to play the game more, and travel more, interact to study and get ahead on each other.”
When asked about the ways the metagame has changed in recent years, Strenkowski was quick to rattle off a list of recent developments.
“New techniques have been learned, such as v-canceling, ledge dashing.” said Strenkowski. “There have been new mods coming out to make the game more fair because there have been controller issues. It’s hard to get a decent controller for the game, so there are mods that standardize the controller, so even if you got the bad one, it still works well for Melee.”
The series has sold well commercially, with over 40 million sales over its 18 year history, but the community surrounding it’s competitive aspects is fascinating. For a game that on the outset is very goofy, with bizarre items and corny stage hazards featured in the vanilla game, the degree of competition has seemingly come out of left field.
In tournaments, these features are turned off. The levity of the normal game is replaced with countless hours of practice and strategic analysis of the metagame. This was almost certainly not the intention when the game was first released, but the community managed to build one of the biggest esports out of what is essentially a party game.
“I’m personally under the belief that all Smash games were built, and are built to be a party game.” said Dingley. “That’s why there’s so much variance in the game itself, because it’s not supposed to be something that’s competitive, the community itself made it competitive.”
Leave a Reply