Happy birthday! Today, Super Smash Bros. Melee turns fifteen years old. And Smash for Wii U turns two years old. I thought this was a fitting occasion to talk a bit about how I got involved with competitive smash in the first place. I’ll also briefly reminisce about my smash career before you probably heard of me.

People are usually surprised when they hear how long I’ve been around in the scene. I wasn’t on most people’s radars until Project:M became big at Xanadu and I got to show off my Mewtwo (plus many other characters) every Tuesday. The first time I met Westballz was actually at a Melee Xanadu, and I recall him cheering for me during a set – “Yeah, show em that PM players can play Melee too!” I know lloD has had similar experiences, with people assuming he was a Brawl player first – his trademark patience is often attributed to his high skill level in Brawl. But I’m here to give you the full story!

Me and smash go a long way back. My earliest memory of smash is watching my sister, who is older than me by nine years, play with our two cousins (who are both around her age) in Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. She played Luigi, because green was her favorite color, while one of my cousins played Kirby and the other bomb-camped with Link. I distinctly remember them playing on Hyrule Castle, and someone got a Charizard out of a Pokeball on the top platform. I didn’t know what Charizard was… so I believed them when they told me that they “released the dragon from the castle prison.”

Eventually I got old enough to understand the game, and my brother, lloD, and I started playing ourselves. I had formed a habit of copying things my sister did, as younger siblings do, and so I became attached to Luigi early on. We played and had fun. It was good times.

We started playing way more later in elementary school when Melee came out (15 years ago today!). We got the game a bit later than our friends because we didn’t have a Gamecube, but we finally got it. My fellow 2nd-graders had already been unlocking characters, and my best friend was coming up with cool strategies. At one of our many sleepovers, he was “teaching” me how to utilize Mewtwo’s movement options. We talked about how there’s a visual effect for Mewtwo’s UpB, but not for his airdodge, and so that would be the best way to identify where he’s going if he disappears.

Having a brother meant I played a LOT of Melee. We would play each other and put time into the single-player events. In 2005, we got good enough that our friends didn’t want to play with us anymore. I was in 6th grade at the time, and my brother was in 5th. Up until this time, we were both pretty obsessed with Runescape, but that obsession was dying down. We needed another outlet.

Everything changed the day I looked up “super smash bros competitions” (…or something like that) on Google. That is how I found Smashboards.

Smashboards opened my eyes. It gave us access to guides, fellow smash competitors, tournaments, and so on. The possibilities were endless. It was at this time that I struggled to come up with a “gamertag” to use on the forums, but my 6th-grade self eventually decided that “Smash G 0 D” sounded really cool. And it still does, right guys?! Even without all those spaces in-between letters!

I created my Smashboards account in October 2005, and went to my first tournament in November of 2005: BOMB4. My dad drove me, my brother, and some friends to the event. We only entered doubles, got bodied, then left. But it was still fun, and we talked about it for a long time. For the first few years of entering tournaments, there was something extremely exhilarating about playing people who were so much better at the game. Unfortunately, we could only go to a few events per year – our parents didn’t want us playing too much smash, especially at tournaments with older people that we didn’t know very well.

I tried finding my first Smashboards post, but for some reason the archive only goes far back as 2006, so the oldest post I could find was about the FC3 East Coast vs. West Coast crew battle. I watched that crew battle so many times. I downloaded it and put it on my PSP, watching it over and over when we would travel. I loved seeing the top-level play, and I loved seeing East Coast pop off. As an aspiring Marth player with a lot of East Coast pride, I really looked up to Azen and Husband in particular. It’s also worth noting that, at this time, YouTube hadn’t even been created, and we watched all our videos through DC++ (p2p video sharing) or Google Video or some other voodoo methods. Another fun fact – my dad warmed up to the smash community more after chatting with Husband and seeing that smashers were just normal people with a unique hobby.

In Spring of 2006, my brother and I went to Redd’s house and met him for the first time. He was a Falco main, and I remember the first match we played was him beating my Luigi with Ganondorf. He would Fair my shield, and L-cancel it into a jab, and I couldn’t beat it. Later, he 4-stocked my Fox with his Falco (the only Falco game he played). For the most part, he beat my brother and I with his secondaries. Our moms chatted upstairs while we played. We played for about 45 minutes total, then had to leave. It still felt awesome playing someone so good (also, Redd was 14 or 15 years old at this point).

I can’t say I remember what my brother’s gamer tag was this early on… at some point, though, I thought it would be cool to call him “Sheikij,” derived from “Sheikage” like “pwnage” like “ownage.” It was 2006, guys. People read the tag as “Sheik I J,” however, and pronounced the last two letters separately. But mostly they referred to him as my “little bro.” So at some point, he officially named himself “Smash G 0 D’s Little Bro.” In fact, that exact Smashboards username still exists. I just looked it up, and found a post where he points out that he 4-stocked some guy in our region with Sheik and Zelda, then lists his mains as “Marth and Jiggz” with a Falco secondary. Like I said, our mains and secondaries switched around a ton at this point. This post was also made in the “TNR” thread, which was the first real crew we joined. It stood for “Team No Respect” and included members such as ChozenOne, AlphaZealot, Boss, and EE.

At some point, my brother met Doll, the legendary local Peach player. My brother was a Sheik main with a Peach secondary at this point, if I recall correctly, and was inspired by Doll’s lame playstyle with Peach. He attempted to emulate that style, and adopted the name “lloD,” or “Doll” backwards. It probably isn’t surprising, then, that lloD found further inspiration with Sheik after watching Drephen videos. In any case, the oldest post I can find on his Smashboards account is from 2009, but he was never as avid a Smashboards user as I, so I can’t say exactly when the name-change stuck. It was almost definitely before 2008, though, because he was lloD by the time Brawl came out.

Anecdote time, because I like this story: In 2008, I attended one of ChuDat’s many basement tournaments. This was a Halloween-themed tournament, and we were encouraged to come in costume. I, naturally, came dressed as my favorite player: Azen. I had a button-down and a messenger bag with a “Nintendo Tech Support” sign taped onto it. I was playing with Slikvik, one of our better players at the time and a Peach main, before the tournament. He thought my Fox was pretty good, and mentioned to someone, “you should team with this guy if you want to place in the money.” That was a pretty big compliment for me. He wrestled with ditching his teammate, but eventually decided to in favor of teaming with me (whoops, sorry fam). We played Fox/Peach and ended up getting 2nd in teams. For the life of me, I can’t remember who we beat or who we lost to, but I remember making some pretty big upsets and playing out of my mind. At some point I got so heated and caught up in the moment, that on respawn I just went IN on my partner. He had to say, “yo chill!” before I realized I was attacking the wrong Peach (was DoH on the other team? It must have been another Peach player). In any case, after the set I stood up and noticed the crowd that had been watching… and then noticed that Azen had sat down on the arm of the sofa I was on, right next to me. So that was pretty cool, because I was definitely a fanboy at that point. This tournament is also one of the building blocks upon which I built my career in teams.

For a long portion of my competitive smash career, I tri-mained Luigi, Marth, and Fox. (If you go on Smashboards, you can actually find the Luigi guide I wrote years and years back.) I always struggled with counterpicking because I never knew which of my characters was having a good day. At some point, I started putting faith into my Luigi and saw good results. The last tournament in which I seriously played Luigi was Hyperphoenix 2 at the end of 2013. lloD and I got 2nd in teams with all Luigi/Peach, beating Redd+DoH twice, and losing to Chillin+Cyrain twice. It looks like I got 9th at that tournament, losing to Chillin and Wenbo in singles. Earlier that year, at HyperPhoenix 1, I got 4th in singles, beating Vist, Bones, and DoH with Luigi. I lost to Mew2King and Redd, which was pretty respectable. The results for that tournament were 1. M2K, 2. Eggm, 3. Redd, 4. Me.

For posterity’s sake, here’s a video of my Luigi from Hyperphoenix 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgyjodMRbc

The following year, Project:M 3.0 came out, and I was living with Junebug, so we played a ton of smash. In Melee, I switched to all Fox, and had a decently successful year, beating ChuDat for the first time. This is when I started getting on people’s radars, especially with my Mewtwo play in PM. Then 3.5 came out, and I was still really good, but I started playing less. In early 2015, I heard The Moon was coming to a Xanadu for the second week in a row, and he was disappointed with the competition from the first week, having won with all Fox. I planned to go and give him a challenge, and was worried about beating his Marth with my Fox. I asked Chillin and Redd for advice, and Chillin said, “if you can just get him to play his main, that’ll be good enough.” The day of, I decided to take a leap and try Marth. We played three Marth ditto games, and I won the set. That was the day I realized that becoming a top Melee player was possible – I just needed a sign. Though, I should mention that I then got 4-stocked by Plank and Moon 2-0’d me in the runback. But still. It was a big day for me, and from that day forward I was a Marth main.

The rest, we say, is history. I stopped playing PM, I started playing more Sm4sh, I put my major focus onto Melee, entered EVO for the first time, and have been grinding mostly Melee ever since. But now, if you didn’t know that I’d been around since 2005, now you know! It’s been an absolute pleasure watching Melee go from a fun pasttime as an 11 year-old to a major esport in which I compete as a 22 year-old. And having written that sentence, I now realize that half of my entire life has been shaped by competitive smash and the smash community.

So for all you who love playing the game and who love and support the smash community, thank you. Happy smashing.