Super Smash Bros. Melee has been around for 15 years and in that time has developed into an amazing competitive gaming community. A scene that spans the globe, as seen by the developing communities in Canada, Mexico, South America , Australia, Britain etc. while the focus of the community has been to give people a place to come together to play Melee and socialize with their friends and players from other regions . The competitive part of the scene is just as driven as any other sport when it comes to putting in the time and effort. Players are known for practicing in their room for hours a day perfecting techniques that they read about on a Smashboards forum or a Youtube instructional video, which is a bit more modern and accessible to the community.
Players spend thousands of hours exercising their hands to gain the dexterity needed to compete at a high level. At this point in the life of the Melee competitive gaming, players are aware of the importance of building the muscle of their hands to perform the highly demanding techniques of Melee. The difficulty of these techniques is exemplified by character guides and especially by techniques like multi-shining which requires the player to make a direction and 2 button 1/60th of a second input within a window that is not much longer to link them together.
I believe the obvious distinction between e-sports and athletic sports like football and basketball is the risk to your entire body, compared to broken bones and torn muscles most would find it hard to say Melee meets the requirements of a legitimate sport. I, on the other hand, would argue that competitive video games have earned their right to be known and referred to as a sport. Recently we realized that the toll of the game being played at the top level can damage hand joints and we have learned how important it is to protect your hands as a player by taking the sufficient amount of breaks and performing hand stretches, and also just keeping your entire body in good health is important for a player to be able to play at their best. The most notable example of this being the abrupt end to the player Hax$’s career due to hand pains that required him to get surgery which did not result in his return to the scene because of residual hand pain and other health issues. A great thing Hax$ contributed before retiring from the scene was the focus around the seemingly endless potential of the character Fox, and the work he did with Fox actually contributed to his retirement because of the demanding training regimen.
The potential of Melee is seemingly limitless, there have been videos of tool-assisted gameplay of Melee using the regular game engine demonstrating that the game has possibilities beyond the reach of human capability. This is great for the competitive seen because even though the game hasn’t been patched or changed in fifteen years the way the game is played has continued to evolve year to year with new applicable tech being discovered even in the year 2016.
The greatest contributing factor to the scene becoming commonly recognized as a sport are the international scenes that are growing and their players that come to U.S. events, due to the fact of the U.S. having the largest competitive scene for Melee at the moment, and also vice versa. Top level players are becoming sponsored athletes, but with the recent issues experienced by the competitive player Leffen with trying to travel to the U.S. for tournaments and being denied because Melee not being commonly recognized as a sport made it hard for Leffen to get a work visa. He is unofficially a contender for top 2 or 3 in the world demonstrated by his last performance at the tournament event at G.O.M.L. which had 4 of the “Melee gods” in attendance, where he got first place beating fan favorite Mang0 in grand finals. This win was supposed to be a precursor to the EVO fighting game tournament in Las Vegas, but due to more visa issues, unfortunately, Leffen was unable to make an appearance at what is considered the Superbowl of competitive Melee. With players like Leffen, Armada, Ice, Professor Pro and the like making the international trip to compete in the U.S. competitive scene, the scene needs to be recognized as a legitimate sport. The scene has proved its worth and now just need some cooperation from the people up top. I’m hoping that we see a clear resolution of this problem in the near future and the scene continues to grow towards its greater potential.
