Underneath a bakery in Chinatown, hundreds of fingers work rubber off joysticks. The hard clacking of plastic on plastic fills the plain hallways, audible above rowdy voices and aggressive chiptune.

Some 50 people, a few scratching beards, some dragging along chaperones, have gathered in a Chinese community center to punish each other’s digits with brightly colored characters from Nintendo’s glory days. Harried organizers shout match ups over the chaos of huddled bodies and working controllers. For the next 12 hours, the new location of gaming store Nebulous NYC transforms the whitewashed basement into a coliseum. Here, Super Smash Bros. is pure, vicious sport. The crowd calls for blood.

“Usually we’ve been getting a good 70 kids here,” says organizer Anthony King as he runs between tables sagging under the weight of tube televisions.

For more than a year, King and several other volunteers have hosted tournaments focused around the game that launched the wildly popular Smash competitive scene—2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee. In the 14 years since the game's release, the Melee community exploded in both numbers and sophistication. Bolstered by social media and the rise of live streaming platform Twitch, rules for international play are carefully constructed and fiercely debated by hordes of players online. Top-tier smashers—as devotees call themselves—compete for several-thousand-dollar pots, sustain themselves off monetized Twitch streams, and command tens of thousands of followers on Twitter. Major US tournaments draw players from as far as Sweden, Japan, and Chile. And although the first crop of competitive smashers is now pushing into their 30s, some vets still turn up for even these more casual Saturday tournaments.

Melee isn't the newest Smash title. It's not even the second most recent. Though sequels tend to cannibalize their predecessors in the e-sports arena, so far this game has managed to survive. But every tournament scheduled for this summer's EVO 2015 besides Melee is the most recent edition in its respective series. The irrepressible need for buzz, the requisite attention from gaming companies, and sequels’ typically updated, not overhauled, gameplay combine to favor newer games time and time again. It’s a trend that few games, if any, have been able to withstand without eventually succumbing to irrelevancy.

That's why Sundays with Nebulous has Melee fans feeling uncertain about the future.

The new game in town

This day, players furiously button-mash Gamecube controllers linked up to tube TVs as well. Their wires, however, lead back to Wii Us, and whirring inside is the franchise’s newest incarnation, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (aka Smash 4). Six months since the game’s console release, the players—some as young as 11—already approach the cartoon battles like military tacticians.

“It’s closer to being a chess game than Melee,” King said a few days after the weekend tourney. “Melee is more punish-based, it’s almost overwhelming. In Melee once you have an interaction, that interaction can last for a long time. In 4, you’ll have more interactions lasting for shorter. The game ends up being a series of separate, isolated events.”

Smash 4 shares a common name, premise, and core set of mechanics with its three predecessors: Super Smash Bros. (N64), Melee, and 2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But all are unique, their individual gameplay formulas tweaked and retweaked in the interstitial years. Many still consider Melee the core of competitive Smash, and, on paper, it still dominates. Apex 2015 hosted a total of 1,037 Melee participants, the event’s largest such tournament to date. But Smash 4 was only 200 participants behind—its singles bracket counted 837 entrants. Thanks to the newest game, competitive Smash in all its incarnations is having a moment.

“The game's looking to be great over the years, in terms of variety, growth, and spectator-wise,” said Apex’s reigning champion, Chilean smasher Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios.

It’s early in the lifespan of Smash 4, but its competitive play has proved quietly revolutionary in another sense. Nintendo of America, sensing big marketing potential for their newest release, began sponsoring tournaments ahead of and following Smash 4’s rollout (Apex included). Two years earlier, the corporation attempted to prevent EVO, the country’s largest fighting game tournament, from hosting any Smash events in 2013.

Despite all the momentum for Smash at-large, this development has prompted a new round of hand-wringing for competitive players. To outsiders, Smash 4 is just another Smash buffed and polished to match the latest hardware. Yet at Nebulous and elsewhere, crossover between the new contender and the old standard is rare—as is dialogue between players. Barrios’ February victory was soured with boos and chants of “Melee!” by the crowd, annoyed by the wait to see Apex’s main event. To them, the newest game is just a novelty. And in competitive Smash, novelties aren’t taken too kindly.

So less than a year into the newest generation of Smash, a rift within the community between the Smash 4 avant-garde and Melee traditionalists is deep and getting deeper. What competitive Smash ought to and will look like going forward—united, divided, or doomed altogether—remains unclear.

This is precisely where the legacy of Brawl—the game separating Melee and Smash 4 in the series chronology—looms largest.

Prior to Brawl’s release in 2008, Smash players united under the banner of Melee, and the series’ competitive potential was finally breaking into the mainstream. Major League Gaming picked up Melee in 2004, and competitors battled for $10,000 pots. But with announcement of Brawl, there was a growing sense that Melee would become obsolete. MLG pre-emptively dropped Melee in 2007 to make way for the new game. EVO picked up Melee when MLG dropped it, only to also replace it with Brawl a year later.

The hotly anticipated Brawl wasn’t what Melee-bred smashers hoped it would be. The game targeted casual gamers to an even greater degree, offering slower and quirkier (see it's like it's guaranteed KOs) gameplay. It drove a wedge between Melee diehards and those attracted to the new game. Tensions flared, and many of the highest-level players accelerated toward retirement. Melee’s upward momentum effectively halted. In fact, after Brawl arrived on North American shores on March 9, 2008, not a single national Melee tournament was held for 364 days.

Obviously given its popularity today, Melee ultimately restarted itself and survived. Brawl was dropped from the EVO circuit after 2008, and MLG followed suit in 2011. But the damage was done.

New tactics

By every traditional metric, Smash 4 has been a monster hit. The Wii U version sold 3.4 million copies in less than two months and nearly single-handedly saved Nintendo’s beleaguered eighth-generation console’s holiday sales. November 2014 included the Wii U’s best sales week since it launched two years earlier; December 2014 became the best single month.

Critically, the game has been no less impactful. It boasts an impressive 92 on Metacritic. Ars editor Andrew Cunningham called Smash 4 “the best reason yet to buy a Wii U,” going as far as to suggest Melee diehards would find enough to like to plunge into the new game. Critics praised its ease for newcomers, its depth for old timers, and the fact that even after all the years the thing was still fun as hell.

That last part has always been key for the franchise’s long-time Director Masahiro Sakurai. The developer has repeatedly said Smash is meant to be a party game, something to be played on the couch rather than in packed tournament halls. His antipathy for the whole competitive approach to the game is well-known.

“Personally, I feel that if you want to play a fighting game seriously, there are other competitive fighting games that are more suited to that,” he told Japanese game magazine Nintendo Dream in late 2014. “People like that could have fun playing those. If you play Smash Bros. seriously as a competitive game, the game itself has no future.”

His last two games have taken this logic to heart. Melee’s speed has been integral to its appeal as a competitive game. Top players can mash up to six to seven inputs a second, on par with Starcraft. But while breakneck pace made for great competitive play, Sakurai himself said the game was “too difficult.” So its direct sequel, Brawl, took the exact opposite approach. It’s a plodding, more curious game. The title earned widespread acclaim from critics and casual gamers, but many competitive smashers revolted.

Even today Brawl continues to be spat at by most Melee players, who describe it as sluggish and poorly balanced. And, accordingly, the game has not been treated kindly by tournament history. Just 176 people signed up for Brawl singles at the most recent Apex. It took a squad of modders to entirely rehash the game for it to gain any traction competitively. That resulting product, Project M (PM), sits closer to Melee in form and adding additional characters and stages, but it resides in legal gray area. Nintendo has come down hard, going as far as to block discussion of the mod on Miiverse channels. In November of last year, Apex organizers axed PM from its roster altogether. Nintendo joined the tournament as an official sponsor two months later.

“Brawl was a very good game in my eyes,” said Richard “Keitaro” King, a smasher and organizer who runs the popular Rush Hour Smash YouTube channel. “But it suffered from tripping, low hit stun, the ability to stall, and characters that over-centralized the game, including infinites (guaranteed KO combos). A lot of these features called for stale gameplay in the later years of the game.”

Despite the outcry, Smash 4 followed in the same “fun” mold. On the surface, it’s faster than Brawl and slower than Melee, but it’s far closer to the former in pace and form. Many of the advanced techniques commonplace in Melee were stripped out. As a result the new game converted few from the Melee camp. But for the generation of smashers who came of age with Brawl, this was a step up—fresher, more balanced, more rewarding of risks.

“This game takes the basic Brawl engine and instead of changing it a lot, fixes the major complaints from a competitive standpoint,” said Samuel “Dabuz” Buzby, a New York-based smasher who finished second behind ZeRo at Apex. “As a result Smash 4 feels, given the current metagame, more balanced and more rewarding to players with strong fundamentals compared to Brawl.”



At their core, 4 and Brawl share a common tactical play, one focused on discrete attacks and counters rather than long strings of combos. Players will launch a one-two punch, retreat to neutral ground, and re-initiate an attack rather than punish another player hit after hit after hit. But the gameplay changes from Brawl discovered over the last six months have caused the metagame—the collection of strategies, counter strategies, character, and stage assessments that define competitive play on a more conceptual level—to change from month to month, maybe even week to week.

“The game is so raw and so new, it’s really just the beginning,” said smasher Tyrell “Nakat” Coleman, still streaming over his popular Twitch account.

Players point to stronger shielding and a more fluid combo and movement system, plus a more balanced cast of characters across the board. There's also the game’s curious “rage mechanic,” which increases attacks’ knockback the more lives a character has lost.

But the most important strategical tweaks, players say, are alterations to the off-stage game. Characters’ fall speeds are even slower than Brawl, and lag upon landing is worse. At the same time, repeat ledge grabs no longer prompt invulnerability, preventing players from strategically blocking out recovering opponents.

“That seems like a kind of casual change, but in a sense it’s not,” said Coleman. “It opened up a new dynamic that many players six months in are still not taking advantage of.”

Combined with the strongest jump moves yet for the series, this causes the space on the peripheries of the box—places that a player could rarely, if ever recover from—to become critical strategic points when compared to earlier Smash.

“You’ll see players do even crazier stuff off the edges that would have been totally dangerous in Melee, Brawl, or 64, but in 4, they are totally safe,” said King. “Recoveries have been boosted so much, off-stage interaction is so much more important.”

Listing image by Flickr user: alltheaces