Growing a Community: Vermont, Denny’s, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

The story of how a small, rural state grew a bustling Esports community

Feb. 24, 2019: the sixth tournament in Vermont’s competitive Super Smash Bros. Ultimate season. Cramped inside a small room in Champlain College were 37 people from New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont, sharing wings and conversation as they all competed to win. Matches were filled with both tension and laughter as players united under their shared love of the game they were competing in.

This phenomenon is nothing new. For over three years, people in Burlington and surrounding areas have been coming together in the same small room to play the game’s previous installment, Super Smash Bros for the Wii U. Simon “Rags” Estabrook, official tournament organizer for the Vermont Smash community, gave some remarks on its founding.

“Both Sam “Roka” Scott and I loved Smash [for the Wii U], but we noticed there weren’t many tournaments being run at Champlain College,” said Estabrook. “So, in 2015, we decided to start a Champlain College Smash Club, with a PR (Power Ranking) specific for the college. It was around the summer of 2016 that the larger Burlington area started to get involved, with the monthlies hosted by Jason “Jace” Singh.”

“At the beginning our numbers grew very quickly,” Estabrook said. “The first tournament started with only about eight people, but it quickly became around 20 in a few weeks.”

While the community was well established, it was rather small. “We developed a pattern over the years. The summers and winters were around 5–12 people, then we had a boom at the beginning of the semester. After this, though, we were stuck around 15 to 20.” A lot of this can be chalked up to both the relatively small population of the state and the fact that a lack of internet infrastructure in the larger region lead to a culture that generally had less access to — and subsequently less interest in — video games, one factor can’t be overlooked:

The Nintendo Wii U was a really, really exclusive console.

Between a starting price that was higher than what its hardware deserved, a shaky, ineffective marketing scheme, and a lack of focus and direction, it was no surprise that not many people purchased the Wii U. People didn’t even realize that it was its own console. It follows, then, that the amount of people exposed to the game in question would also be less; dramatically so.

This lack of availability is a double-edged sword. On one hand, exclusivity builds camaraderie. Being so close with such a small group of people builds a level of companionship that is stronger, with people that are closer together, than a larger scene. Even in those larger scenes, you often end up with smaller sub-groups forming to achieve this same effect.

You start to form traditions that make your community more unique. In Vermont’s case, this includes things like packing up and going to Denny’s after every tournament or making fun of New Hampshire (a mood derived from the general attitude of the state). It was this small scene that attracted players like Joseph “Alice Æterna” Castañer of Puerto Rico to come to Vermont.

“I always wanted to play throughout high school and would attend random tournaments, but Puerto Rico had the same problem every big scene had” said Castañer, relaxing in the middle of bracket with a milkshake from the food service upstairs. “If you didn’t know anyone, it was a lot of losing and immediately leaving since there was nobody to talk to. You wouldn’t feel comfortable asking for a lot of friendlies either.”

Pictured in the foreground, from left to right, back to front: Trevor “Hoax” Amell, Joseph “Alice Æterna” Castañer, Corey “Blitzcomet” Dew, Ari “Lazar181” Blechman

“Vermont was different” Castañer said. “The low amount of people meant everyone knew each other and was pretty friendly, plus there was no real loss to entering. Entry was a single dollar, so I could round up my college friends every week and go and have loads of fun, not worrying about losing $20 in the process.”

That being said, a smaller scene has a lot of dangerous consequences, both socially and competitively. Firstly, you end up with a lack of diversity. The same thoughts and ideas are echoed around the venue, with no fresh faces to shake things up. People become comfortable with those around them, and slowly become uncomfortable with those who aren’t.

Competitively, in a game like Smash where people’s styles can be as unique and identifiable as a fingerprint, your practice starts to become stale, and a lack of player and character diversity leads to a lack of match-up experience, severely hurting your chances in tournaments outside the region.

“We don’t get practice against certain match-ups,” says Castañer, rolling his eyes and sitting back as he repeats his weekly rant. “Vermont has a lot of issues with it’s very high-level players being good at fighting other high-level players, but ending up losing to lower level players who can play some random character at a decent level.”

The Vermont scene began to stagnate. At one point, tournaments were getting only around 10 to 20 people a week. Few people had the chance to get anywhere in bracket without running into a ranked player, causing many who are less serious to stop showing up. The future of Smash in Vermont began to look smaller and smaller.

On Dec. 7, 2018, everything began to change.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was released for the Nintendo Switch — a console that, by virtue of its portability and accessibility, has, in under two years, already outsold the Wii U across its six-year lifespan. The game itself, being only a month old, has outsold its predecessor. The weekly tournaments saw a new influx of people all wanting to compete in this new game. Tournament attendance practically doubled, growing from around 20 participants to nearly 40.

“The release of Smash Ultimate was something else entirely,” said Sam “Roka” Scott, one of the founding members of the Vermont Smash scene. “Seeing such a large amount of new players was really inspiring. It made it feel like a place I could go every week and meet someone new.”

Pictured, left to right: Daniel “Failboat” Michaud, Ari “Lazar181” Blechman, Sam “Roka” Scott, Joseph “Alice Æterna” Castañer, Chris “ALT” Damon, Simon “Rags” Estabrook

These people are staying and contributing to the community, expanding and diversifying it. New people are taking part in old traditions, and as such, new traditions are forming. Champlain College Esports has added a Smash Ultimate team to their lineup, looking to compete at national events. With the release of Vermont’s final Smash Wii U PR, the scene marked its step out of the obscurity and exclusivity of the past and into an exciting new future.

As the game develops, so too will the scene, growing out of the constraints and trends of their aging state, but none of it would be possible were it not for the amazing people who established the scene. These people stuck with their small community in the face of nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut, two huge states for Smash, and because of that, the scene was able to handle the influx of people brought by Smash Ultimate.

New life is being pumped into Vermont Smash, and after all that we’ve been through, we couldn’t be happier.