Competitive Smash Bros. has been on quite the high note since Evo 2013. The hype that was generated from this year’s installment of the largest fighting game tournament in the world hasn\’t drifted away – in fact, the buzz has not only firmly dropped anchor, but the community continues to show how active and thriving it is. Impromptu setups of Melee at Bryant Park in Manhattan are becoming weekly occurrences. Shows like Melee It on Me and streamers like Clash Tournaments and VG BootCamp continually push out content for competitive fans. In all honesty, it’s a great time to be a Smasher.

Of course, if there’s a parade, there’s a chance of rain, and finally just a bit of drizzle has sneaked its way onto the internet by way of Kyle Mercury, former Nintendo marketing employee recently interviewed over at Not Enough Shaders. While I\’m not a weatherman, the rain seems to be very off.

According to Mercury, who worked at Nintendo of America from 2001 until 2007, the problems with Melee and Evo 2013, and apparently competitive Smash in general, are two-fold: First, the game potentially hinders Nintendo’s marketing abilities if a 12-year-old, two-generations-ago game is pulling eyes and attention away from newer releases. Second, Smash Bros is violent. So…yeah, not sure where he was going with that.

Before I address his actual responses, I want to first address a very important part of Melee’s inclusion on the Evo 2013 line-up – competitive gamers and casual gamers alike, all ~134,000 of them (not 125,000 as Mercury said, which was actually the peak for the Super Street Fighter IV Grand Finals), were glued to a game they made twelve years ago. Let me stress how insane that is – despite Nintendo completely shunning the game’s competitive scene for years, despite competitive Smash being the butt end of jokes for anyone who could make a decent Final Destination reference, despite being over a decade out from Melee’s actual release; over a hundred thousand people gave competitive play a chance. And they loved it.

If anything, this speaks to the timeless essence and superb design of Melee that allows it to completely outclass many of today’s competitive games and endlessly remain not only a pure form of entertainment for over a decade, but a fierce test of skills, reaction time, endurance, speed, and creativity. It’s an experience Nintendo has not been able to replicate since Melee’s release, and this is especially evident in how Brawl turned out for competitive players and how Smash 4’s development has formed based on reactions to the two previous games.

Nintendo and Masahiro Sakurai should take this opportunity to reflect on what makes Melee not only such an amazing game and experience, but why it is still an active game in tournaments today. Why else would it have been the second most watched fighting game competition — second only to Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 at that very same event — of all time?

Having somewhat addressed Mercury’s \”promotional\” point, I would like to quickly respond to this:

“People always say \’It’s free promotion!\’, but that’s like using a Gameboy Advance SP to promote the 3DS. It was great at the time, but it’s not doing you any favors in 2013.”

An interesting analogy at first glance, but it breaks under scrutiny. Let’s take a look at why this doesn\’t work the way he claims.

The systems that launched between the Gameboy Advance SP and Nintendo 3DS were the Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite and Nintendo DSi, while a resounding zero games were released between Melee and Smash’s most recent title, Brawl. Not only that, but Brawl is over a five-year-old game and the next Smash game will not be out until sometime next year. Is Evo or any competition of Melee affecting Nintendo’s promotion of Smash at all? I think not. Nobody is going to take Sakurai’s weekday screenshot updates any different just because they also enjoy competitive Smash.

Now, this is the most bewildering part of the entire article, that “Smash is dangerous because of the content/playstyle of the game,” which is as obvious as grass is green, the sky is blue, and that nobody has had any problem with Nintendo characters beating the living hell out of each other since the first game’s release in the late 90’s. If Nintendo feared any problems of violence or something like that, they shouldn\’t have released a fighting game with Nintendo characters three separate times. Nintendo characters are still Nintendo characters whether they are in their own games, being played in Smash at a friend’s house, or at a major competition. There’s absolutely no proof or evidence or any logic to these claims that “Evo would have taken the character representations out of the hands of Nintendo’s control,” (Evo did happen — did Mercury’s prediction actually come true?) or that it would “boil them down to pure violence,” (almost every character in the Smash roster comes from a game that has violent qualities already, a super-majority of them fitting this criteria).

Just as Nintendo often comes off as disconnected from current gamers, especially competitive ones, so too does Mercury seem to be disconnected from the circumstances of Evo 2013 and the competitive scene — it’s a constant uphill battle just for recognition from developers; the fact that Nintendo’s decision to ban Melee from being streamed at Evo 2013 was reversed just in time for the tournament was a major victory in itself, even if the decision wasn\’t intentional in the first place.

Competitive Smash in no way threatens brands, and if anything it perpetuates them – it allows people to see their favorite characters beat each other up, and in the hands of top players, that’s an amazing spectacle with all the advanced techniques and strategy at their disposal. It shows a completely unique and exciting experience that is supplementary to the overall Super Smash Bros experience; it\’d be wise for Nintendo to not fear or feel threatened by competitive Smash, but embrace it so that a cooperative and collaborative relationship can be established.

Satoru Iwata said this himself, that \”the best possible countermeasure against people buying used product is making the kind of product that people never want to sell.\” After twelve years, Melee is still one of the most active competitive games in the world. That sounds exactly like the game Iwata is talking about. Why should he not invest in the future of Smash as a competitive title?

\”The popular image of Mario, the widely publicly recognized one, can never be of him beating the hell out of Princess Peach,\” claims Mercury.

Seems to me like Nintendo doesn\’t have much of a problem having the popular image of Mario beating up others, especially on television.