~ Estimated Reading Time: 7 min ~

As someone who literally only cared about Pokemon at the time - having gotten into video games for the sake of a show I liked, rather than the other way around - Melee trojan horsed caring about an entire medium into my life. Through simply having Pikachu on its cover, my own life serves as a perfect example for Smash's initial reason for being a crossover - accessibility. It had the opportunity to catch me up with everything else I had missed. For a tiny kid who didn't have many friends, Melee wasn't a party game, it was a maze; I spent countless hours navigating its Y2K spacey-lavished single-player modes, scavenging for unlockables. The event modes were too hard for me, leaving me reading guides on all the other ways to unlock characters, which got me reading about the characters. Trophy descriptions and wiki pages seamlessly melted into my mind to form an encyclopedia of knowledge for all these things I hadn't experienced - both deeper within the game, and beyond it as well. Marth and Roy are buried far in - website whispers of their existence making the wait to unlock them tantalizing - but their language-obfuscated origins only brought more questions once I finally got to them. The day someone told me you could get Mewtwo if you left a match play for 24 hours was one of the most intensive days of my childhood self's life; anxiously waiting, knowing my Gamecube could unplug, or explode or something. It probably helped that Nintendo kept making games about literal aliens, but so much about the constant clash of Melee's aesthetics left me interested; like the weird HR Geiger thing in the Metroid stage background, or the phantasmagorical nature of Shogo Sakai's takes on the Earthbound soundtrack. A million people have written about how as a kid, games had this inherent wonder to them, but mine was with a video game that used video games as a whole's history to turn itself into a mystery.

My time with it didn't end there, though, because Melee is a fluid game. Even its aesthetics enforce a flexible tone; I remember as a kid, I'd play Pichu, but despite the silly nature of the game, when I wanted to prove myself and win, I'd go Roy (he just looked cool...). After a long session of messing around on Temple or Pokefloats, we'd send it off with this ruleset we had only vaguely heard about, 'no items, final destination'. As Smash had succeeded in making me get further into games, Melee naturally fell down in my list of fixations before I'd explore that concept deeper - until I'd have the game suddenly recontextualized for me by the release of the Melee documentary in 2013. In retrospect, I had a very pure introduction to the competitive scene through it. if I was any older, I'd have probably talked directly to its playerbase of bronerds, and any younger I would've been put off by the genuine abuse stories circulating its in-person events. I had just spent so much time as a kid obsessively trying to know everything about this game, after spending so much unforgettable time trying to peel back its layers, that seeing people had dug so so so so so much further than me, was the first time I realized the game was larger than my grasp. I could never have all its content, when some of that content is history, some of its content is people. It taught me that depth wasn't just some fallible thing that brought my childhood self more hours, but that game design could be so beautifully structured it could form community. It made for the first time realize that this video game shit mattered. Looking back, it probably was the origin point of me becoming the type of freak who would wax soliloquies about party games.

And while I dove into the past of its competitive history, until I eventually caught up - watching sets that people are still jealous I saw live - becoming the second phase of my obsession, I wouldn't ever really play competitive Melee. I was still a kid; I couldn't convince my conservative-ass parents to take me to play a video game with strangers, nor did I have any friends into this weirdo hobby, and my computer wasn't good enough for the burgeoning netplay scene. So even if it took years, I eventually fell out of interest again. But, sometime late last year, I sorta just realized that this experience had been waiting on me this whole time, so I did it. I got to the center of what I had wanted to explore for so long: I played some Slippi.

It's good, I think!!!!! While I do adore the "happy accident" narrative surrounding the game's scene, too much stuff here is intentional; there's no arbitrary explanation for why Falco - a vertical character - has a reflect hitbox that sends you up. More aptly, it's a game made from intuition; decades of beat'em'up and fighting game wisdom culminating into something that wears depth on its sleeves, without even knowing how people would seek that depth out. It's the most emotional game on earth; through every motion in its highly expressive engine, you can see fear in someone through the little imprecisions. Its training weights cruel and unnecessary. There is no "smart design" in L canceling, but there's something better: everyone's willingness to overcome its friction. I've played games in which I had to relearn my combos after putting it down, but not ones in which I've had to relearn the Layer 1 of just moving around after a week break. The first twenty minutes of a Melee session feel like fighting for control of your body in a dream - the inability to grasp anything, the skips in my jump I didn't intend. And then I focus as hard as I can, and I take a little step, and I misinput, hit a nair, misinput again, land a tech chase, and I jump and hit a knee. The last twenty minutes of a Melee session feel better than every video game in the world, and I truly believe this would be the greatest game in the world, forever - if I were simply Mango. You just have to play it for ten years to reach that, and taking ten year long breaks doesn't count :(

Anyways, playing more Smash got me reminiscing with my friends about how the series affected us. Among people who grew up with practically any entry, I consistently see its impact acknowledged: "It introduced me to series I like, which got me into its fandom, which changed my life" is a common one, and the more direct "playing a multiplayer game united me with a community of people who changed my life" comes up often too. What stuck out to me the most was what a particular friend told me, saying "as an antisocial kid, Melee's naturally obsessive nature gave me something to care about, that actually got me talking to people" - and it kinda said the subtext out loud, right? It gameified the process of learning about games, which got me scrolling through all these communities, which got me meeting people. And now, no matter how far I am from Melee itself, I'm STILL here - still the type reading and writing endlessly on journal sites, appreciating video games through the perspective of people's stories about them. Melee taught me the path between appreciating art and appreciating people is a straight line.
I could pour over so much about its mechanics, hotlink a bunch of AsumSaus clips, or gush about the opening movie, but I know that the single best piece of design in this thing is its consistent ability to give us _something else.