“Game 3 on Fountain of Dreams and I just landed a charge shot.. “Destruction” D1 sputters into the mic, “He’s not even shooting missiles no more” and “YOOOO” Toph and Scar say, respectively, “Lemme tell ya, this boy is like a mixed-girl under a magnifying glass in the Sahara cause he is hot!” howls EE, because in my mind there are 4 people commentating my set. Hell yeah.” Thinks Adam Gamblin, a Samus main from Olathe, Kansas. The 15 year-old invited a Bad Melee reporter to the game room of his parents’ house to explain his training regimen earlier this week.

“Typically I start out practicing ledgedashes and then after I flub them enough I’ll switch to VS mode so I can beat up some computers” he starts. “I’ll body some Falcons and Marths for a bit but then I’ll switch to my best matchup, neutral-colored level 9 fox.” When pressed for answers as to why he spent so much time playing against this specific Fox AI, Gamblin elaborated. “Well, every time a Samus beats Leffen that seems to be all anyone wants to talk about, so beating up this Fox helps me pretend that people could care about me and my play someday.” He offered our reporter the opportunity to watch one of his games and the offer simply couldn’t be refused. Said reporter’s retelling of the event is below.

“So he tells me he likes to imagine it’s Game 3 at some super-national where he plays Team SoloMid’s own Leffen in pools and he’s about to pull off the upset of a century. He goes to FoD and then proceeds to destroy the Fox on account of it being an AI designed in 2001. Every stock he takes causes him to become more and more invested in his role, he’s fist pumping and jumping in his seat after every stock taken and then when he finally finishes the 4-stock, holy shit… It was the saddest thing I’ve seen in my life. For comparison, I only had 1 toy when I was growing up. It was a GI Joe that broke at the waist, leaving me with a pair of legs and a soldier’s head on top of arms. I spent a great deal of my childhood staging fights between a pair of legs and an upper-body as a consequence, and watching Adam lose his mind over his delusional role-play was far more sad. He flipped his chair and bunnyhopped around the room and up the stairs while yelling “4-STOCK”. He then came downstairs a minute later with a rice krispies treat and started doing 100 Man Melee. It was a terrifying experience.”

“I asked him why he acts like that afterwards and he goes “Because no one will get excited for a local player like me, so I need to get excited for myself.” If that ain’t the saddest shit.”