Last weekend, I dropped by the Boston apartment of Smash writer Anokh “Edwin_Budding” Palakurthi to discuss his soon-to-be-published volume of Super Smash Bros. Melee history, “The Book of Melee.” Palakurthi and I first met through the Smash scene in 2017, and I was excited to catch up with him and hear his thoughts on the book during the week leading up its release.

Even before I met Palakurthi, I was an avid reader of his blog, a compendium of deeply researched analyses of Melee’s history and metagame. “The Book of Melee” is the culmination of his creative efforts, a multifaceted work that combines years of in-depth research with an unabashed adoration for Melee. (I should know—I edited it.)

This is not the first full-length work to be written about Melee; that title likely goes to Chris “Wife” Fabiszak’s “Team Ben: A Year as a Professional Gamer.” Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto has also published a memoir about his career, and Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman reportedly has one in the works as well.

But “The Book of Melee” isn’t a memoir. It’s a work of narrative non-fiction that provides readers with a detailed timeline of every important tournament, every metagame-defining set, and every fierce rivalry in Melee history. In Palakurthi’s own words, he “took a very detached, very show-and-not-tell approach” to telling the story of Melee. The end result was a comprehensive text that could someday be used to teach the history of competitive Smash in a college classroom. (Don’t worry, it’s still an entertaining read.)