For my second interview of day two, I was excited to talk to someone who’s done so much to advance the competitive Melee meta and help new potential top players get into the game. Lauren and I had been sitting right behind Dan’s booth, so my next target was obvious. Dan shared some very insightful comments about game design and the state of competitive Melee.

Takapunch: What was the inspiration for 20XX?

Dan Salvato: First, I want to clarify that I specifically do 20XXTE. There’s another project that came first called 20XX training hack pack and that’s made by someone else.

As far as 20XXTE specifically, the real inspiration is that I had been doing Melee hacking for years, and as game mods became more accessible thanks to the Wii, interest grew in the Melee scene for new aesthetics and other features. This encouraged developers to make more mods, because they were becoming more mainstream. Players and hackers started to embrace mods more than before. Then we found out about the memory card hack, and suddenly there’s a way to load mods on a memory card and it’s even more accessible.

We don’t need a modded Wii anymore, so now the question is: if you have an accessible mod that people can bring to any setup, what features do you want on it? It should be polished, professional, usable in tournaments, and have something for everyone. So that was the inspiration for it.

T: What were some of the first features you knew you were going to add?

D: Some of the first ones were obvious features from existing Melee mods like L-cancel indicators, salty runbacks where you hold A and B to restart a match, setting default tournament settings, stage striking on the stage select screen, and the ability to freeze stage hazards. Things that are quintessentially useful to the community as a whole–no brainers–were the first things I wanted to add.

T: What features didn’t make it in?

D: Many important ones didn’t make it in for various reasons. First off, custom character skins and costumes. They didn’t make it in because of technical limitations; they require more game files and I can’t add those to a memory card hack. Another feature, which is one of the most requested and which I refuse to add, is to enable changing the controls or disabling tap jump like you can with Brawl and Smash 4. Theres a good reason I don’t.

I don’t add features that physically change the way you play the game. If you’re playing Melee, you still need to be playing Melee. Melee is the game you need to get good at. I don’t want to make a situation where people are only good at my setups and can’t play on unmodded setups, because then they’re not actually good at Melee. They’re getting good at a game that’s not Melee, and that creates a divide in the community. Then you have people who only play on TE and people who only play on vanilla because they don’t want to face people who took the easy way. If you’re good at 20XXTE, you’re good at Melee.

S: Any hints on what you have in store?

D: 20XXTE is almost finished. There’s going to be one more update with mostly bug fixes and minor new features. Also, the PAL version of 20XXTE is coming.

T: What are the challenges of modding this particular obscure hardware?

D: By modding Melee we are modding machine code.

T: Yeah, that’s some shit right there.

D: A lot of newer games—and I don’t want to discredit the difficulty of modding any game—but when we’re working with a proprietary game console with a proprietary game engine we have no choice but to reverse engineer from scratch, starting with nothing, with very few tools at our disposal.

T: How long would it take to implement one feature?

D: Some changes that are seemingly significant are only one line of code because we know were to look based on previous research and we know where the functions are mapped out, so that can take a half hour. Other times if we don’t have it documented, then it might take 3 hours of research just to find the appropriate function or line to change, and then it’s still just one line of code.

But then, for more complex features like stage striking, where you have to write many lines of code AND figure out the relevant functions, then that could take hours of research and hours of writing code and testing properly, with probably the more complex features taking up to 20 hours of work to implement something new.

T: How many hours a week?

D: Nowadays I have less time to work on it because I’m more invested in personal projects that I look forward to announcing in the future. But at its peak we’re talking 4 to 8 hours a day working on 20XXTE.

T: What’s one feature you wish you could add if you were given the “keys to the kingdom,” and Nintendo let you do whatever you wanted?

D: The most important/desired feature would be to easily pair up the game with a PC and record stats on all the matches, and automatically report results. Stats collection is one huge advantage that other sporting events have over us. If that were easily accessible to us, it would open up a whole new world.

T: Who’s your main?

D: Link! I guess there’s a story behind that, right? I was formerly known as Internet Explorer, so some people actually know me by my old tag or think I’m not even the same person, which is funny. Here’s the interesting thing, right? The thing I like most about games in general, and this might carry into why I like hacking too, is that I love exploring new things. This carries into speedrunning as well. I use it as a canvas for expressing myself. Originally I started with Falco, but iIfelt like the road was so long with Falco, and there would always be so many Falcos better than I am, who had explored further than I had, so that’s why I decided to main Link.

T: Favorite player?

D: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. Man! I have to think about that one. I’ve met so many players over the year, so my favorite player is based on the coolest person. So for the coolest person I would say PPMD or Armada. Or Swedish Delight. When you talk to them, they don’t feel like “top players.” They just feel like a chill, humble guys. A lot of top players feel very authoritarian or cocky to interact with, but if you’re talking with PPMD or Armada or Swedish outside of a tournament, they just hang out like a normal guy. They’re humble and they’re fun to talk to.

T: Do you think that might be related to the general top player culture within Melee? Granted I mostly focus on Smash 4 as a competitor, but I was talking with Hitaku about how chill all the top Smash 4 players I’ve met have been. He noted that the majority of Smash 4 pros started out in Brawl, where the scene was never as big as Melee had been in its heyday or after its revival post-EVO 2013, so there wasn’t as much room for big egos to grow. Melee has been around for a long time and has deep storylines and a lot of pride, which makes it extremely hype but also perhaps less welcoming.

D: Ever since 2002 with some of the earliest tournaments, Melee really emphasized being proud of your game and your region, and having beef between regions to add excitement, so that’s still a big part of the game and can make Melee seem unfriendly to people who are new to it. It’s not deliberately unfriendly, but that image is a side effect of having the culture of pride and crews and beefs.

T: Who’s your least favorite character?

D: My least favorite character is probably Sheik, because I feel like Sheik singlehandedly shuts down the bottom half of the cast. I feel that when you have a character that simply has a better everything, then it makes the experience a lot less fun for the mid-tiers and the low-tiers,who sometimes have better matchups against spacies than they do against Sheik. Sheik is the most well-rounded good character with the fewest weaknesses.

T: Do you have a favorite set of all time?

D: Nah not really. [Note: this interview occurred before Mango vs. Leffen in Losers’ Quarterfinals the next day, which could very well have changed anyone’s answer.]

T: If you could make any one change to Melee what would it be?

D: In spite of hating on Sheik for shutting out half the cast, in my opinion, part of what makes Melee an amazing competitive game is the lack of viable characters. When you only have about 8 viable characters then you’re spending hundreds of hours learning the tiny little details and intricacies of exact situations, and learning those tiny situations and taking advantage of them is one of the joys of the game–just picking apart the tiniest little details, and that’s only possible with a game that has a limited viable cast and has not been patched in 15 years. But I want to say…I would still shorten Marth’s grab.

T: What do you think of the B0XX?

D: What I like most about it is that it’s a solution for existing hand problems, and it prevents future hand problems from developing. I want to put that above all the controversy surrounding it. Custom controller developers aren’t looking to add unfair advantages. They’re looking to provide an alternate way to play.

T: Anything I didn’t ask that you’d want to share?

D: There’s a lot I’d like to say. One of the first that pops into my mind is, I believe the reason people love Melee so much doesn’t have to do with…I guess the best way to put it is that Melee isn’t a magical phenomenon you can’t find anywhere else. What makes Melee so enjoyable is a brilliant fundamental game design that goes beyond the what you feel in the final product.

So the emphasis on technical pressure, the hypeness of combos, and the rewarding of creativity in your gameplay…all of those aren’t specific to Melee, but they’re reasons to love it. Melee is a fundamentally well-designed game for those reasons, and I encourage people to find the beauty of Melee in all games and in life. Fundamentals can be implemented in any kind of game. That said, Melty Blood is the greatest fighting game in the universe.

Right as I was finishing up with Dan, Alex Jebailey came by to ask a few questions! I Jebaited him into an interview, so check back soon to hear about how he came up in the fighting game community and what he thinks of the scene today.