My History with Melee

Although I’ve only been “known” in the Melee community relatively recently (largely due to playing in Norcal, a region with very high visibility, and working on GAR PR), I’ve actually followed the community for a fairly long time. I’ve been aware of the competitive Melee scene since the beginning, although most of that time was spent on the outside looking in.

I grew up in Houston and I started playing Melee casually with some of my older brother’s friends when I was in middle school (probably around 2002). I was always a competitive kid growing up, so I absolutely had to be the best out of my group of friends. I scoured the Internet for anything I could find about Melee and stumbled across Smashboards, where I learned what wavedashing was. I discovered the legendary DC++ hub and downloaded as many Melee videos as I could on my 56k connection. The memories are fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure my first attempt at picking a main character was choosing Mewtwo. At some point, I picked Sheik and beat my friend for the first time ever in a 1-on-1 match, and I never looked back.

I continued playing with my group of friends through high school (I graduated in 2007), as well as reading Smashboards and downloading videos of tournaments whenever I could. I didn’t have the means to make it out to any “real” tournaments consistently. I vaguely remember going to one or two tournaments at some point in high school, but that was about it.

I started college at Rice University in Houston in the fall of 2007, which opened up a whole new source of players for me to play against. Rice is a relatively small school with an undergraduate population of roughly ~3500, so the local community wasn’t huge or super skilled (I was already one of the best players there when I started), but it was nice to have new people to play against. I won a school tournament during my first semester that had ~50 entrants and won myself a pre-order copy of Brawl.

Brawl was released in March of 2008, which was my second semester of college. I dropped Melee completely (or so I thought at the time) to focus on Brawl pretty seriously and ended up becoming one of the best players at Rice (not an amazing accomplishment) as well as attending some community tournaments (more than I ever did for Melee), but most of my activity was still within the Rice community. I lost faith in Brawl as a competitive game after a year or so and went back to Melee, but this was during the “Dark Age” caused by Brawl and the Melee interest at Rice had almost completely died out. I started an eSports club with a friend and ran a few school tournaments, but we usually had < 8 entrants for each of them. One very cool opportunity I had at Rice though was to teach a student-taught course during my senior year. Naturally, I decided to teach one about Melee. I wasn’t a super skilled player at that time, so I probably said a lot of wrong things, but it was still an amazing experience and I exposed some people to the Melee community for the first time. Admiral, the Ice Climbers player, was actually one of my students in that class, and I believe that was her first exposure to competitive Melee (correct me if I’m wrong Hannah!).

I graduated from Rice in the spring of 2011 and landed a full-time job in Austin, starting that summer. With the responsibilities of school out of the way and the luxury of disposable income, I dived head-first into the local Melee community of Austin and finally began to attend tournaments regularly. People often ask when I started “going to tournaments,” and this is the time period I usually refer to as the beginning of my competitive Melee career, even though I knew a fair amount about the community and the game before then. I wasn’t new to the game by any means, but I was brand new to being a part of the community.

Texas is usually off the radar when people think about strong Melee regions, but the top Texas players are great players and always have the potential to make a dent at nationals (shoutouts to Mojo, Arc, Tirno, MT, and Jake13). The scene was still recovering from the Dark Age at that point, so tournaments were infrequent and small. I spent 2 years in Austin, learned a ton about Melee, made life long friends, and then moved to Norcal in the summer of 2013 for a better job opportunity. The Austin scene will always have a special place in my heart and I still keep in frequent contact with them. When I left Texas, I would have put myself somewhere around #6–10 on the theoretical Texas power rankings (we didn’t have one at that time).

Norcal is where I really started taking off and improving as a player (for obvious reasons). The depth and breadth of skill of Norcal’s Melee community can only be rivaled by a few other regions in the world. After settling in, I went to every tournament I possibly could (2 a weekend whenever I could, as well as the Foundry every Tuesday) and worked hard to improve. This time period was also the beginning of the “Platinum Age” of Melee (post EVO 2013 and the documentary), so tournaments were abundant. I barely missed being placed on the top 20 Norcal power ranking in May of 2014, and finally debuted at #20 on the September 2014 ranking. I slowly climbed, coming in at #18 in January of 2015 and #13 in June of 2015, which was the last official Norcal ranking that was made. You can see the recent Norcal power rankings here. My rate of improvement was not drastic like some other more notable players and I never made headlines for being the fastest improving player, but my progress was consistent and it’s something I’m fairly proud of.

In early 2015, I landed a new job that I was extremely excited about, so Melee took a backseat for a little while. My tournament attendance in the last year has been relatively spotty and I’m just very recently starting to pick it back up again. Many up-and-coming players in Norcal have surpassed me in that time, which is both inspiring and a little nerve-wracking. Coming into Genesis 3 (which took place in January of this year), I decided that I would stop playing Sheik and try to only play Fox instead. I wasn’t enjoying the game as much playing Sheik anymore and my skill plateau (although almost certainly caused by my own laziness and lack of activity) made me want to try something new.

I’m at an interesting point in my Melee “career”. I’ve decided to drop my long time main of Sheik, a character I’ve played on and off for 13 years and that has given me moderate success. I’ve always been very reluctant to play secondary characters, even in friendlies against players that are much worse than me, so my Melee experience and knowledge is very Sheik-centric. I’m essentially re-learning the game all over again, and I hope that documenting this journey will be insightful. Every matchup feels like a brand new puzzle to solve and I’m more excited about the game than I’ve been in a long while. At first, it was tough to swallow my pride and place 49th at locals, but I’m over that by this point and I’m excited about the future. Who knows, maybe Fox won’t work out for me and I’ll switch back to Sheik. Regardless, I feel that the experience will be worth it. Melee is amazing and you can‘t go wrong as long as you enjoy it.