The Technological Challenges of Competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee

Officially speaking, the Nintendo GameCube is dead. It fought for six solid years, carrying Nintendo through the awkward period at the beginning of the millennium when Microsoft and the console-based first-person shooter began to change the cultural disposition of the industry. It was an ephemeral machine for an ephemeral time, the era of growing pains like Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi's Mansion, The Wind Waker. Afterwards, Nintendo would fully embrace its growing casual audience with the Wii, while Microsoft and Sony continued to duke it out in the ongoing, apocalyptic multimedia wars.

This is how it should be. Save for a few college dorm rooms still cranking Mario Kart 64, old hardware is left in the dust. The GameCube rolls with a puny 162 megahertz GPU presented in muddy standard definition, with no system link or online capabilities. It was introduced in the same year Bill Clinton ceded the U.S. presidency and it sold a modest 21 million units behind both the Xbox and the Playstation 2. I can't think of another modern console that's aged worse. But somehow, it's hosting one of the most active, vibrant, and important competitive communities in all of video games. The issue is that it's a total pain in the ass for the players to keep getting their hands on the tools required to play it.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is a 15-year old game. It has never been patched or officially modified, nor was it ever intended to be taken seriously as a platform for prizefighting. It's an arena where Ganondorf can punch Pikachu in the face. They made sequels: Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008, and the verbosely titled Super Smash Bros For 3DS and Wii U in 2014. Both are loved in their own unique ways, but neither of them quite mustered Melee's staying power. Last weekend, an event called Dreamhack Austin boasted a tournament in which some of the world's premier Melee players fought for a $10,000 prize pool, which is far more than you can say for SOCOM, or Halo, or Battlefield: 1942, or practically every other game of the era. The Melee scene will never die, no matter how broken or counterintuitive it might be.

"There's only about ten characters in the upper-echelon worth playing, but I like that because there's no bullshit," says Tyler Untiedt, one of the players who competed over the weekend.

"Nobody is saying, 'Oh, we have to balance this and balance that.' People just have to find the metagame," Untiedt added. "People discover really interesting things in this game all the time."

But as the years go on, the act of playing it has become a challenge unto itself. Most of the people competing in Melee prefer the original, first-generation GameCube controllers released alongside the game when it first came out. These controllers are equipped with unique, analog shoulder buttons, depressible and modular to a full 'click.' That extra functionality is necessary to the nuance of high-level play, and puts them in high demand for the community.

Unfortunately, Nintendo stopped producing the GameCube and all of its residual accessories back in 2007, which has naturally inflated the price. An old PS2 Dualshock will run you about $9, but non-third party GameCube controllers average around $40, with the scene-preferred white, extended cable variant running over $60. In 2014 Nintendo released a new, updated line to coincide with the most recent Smash game, but Melee players are creatures of habit.

"The stick on the new ones are stiffer, I don't like them as much," says Blake McGill, who's been around the Melee scene for seven years. "Once you get used to a controller it's hard to make the switch, you have to break it in and you'll play worse for a while. It's a commitment to switch to a new controller."

Unsurprisingly, busting your controller in Melee can be an ordeal. Either you take to Amazon and try to find the exact flavor you're looking for or you attempt surgery, cannibalizing other, less-optimal controllers to fix a stuck trigger or analog stick.

"You probably have an old, busted GameCube controller lying around that had something wrong with it, so you pop that sucker open with a screwdriver and switch out the parts," says Robert "Wobbles" Wright, one of the best Melee players in the world. "A lot of the maneuvers can be really controller-dependent, but you can't custom order a GameCube controller the way you'd like. However, there are some people who will go to great lengths to Frankenstein a specific joystick with the right shoulder buttons and the right case."

There's not much precedent here. The keyboard and mouse always have and always will be the primary way to interact with video games on a computer, which meant that StarCraft enjoyed a healthy competitive tenure from the late '90s to the release of StarCraft 2 — complete with plenty of doting, management and balance patches from the powers-that-be at developer Blizzard. Counter-Strike has sustained itself for decades. Same with Street Fighter and every other iterative competitive property in the industry. Melee represents the first time a major community has centered around a game that will be forever locked away in the means of a distant epoch. McGill says that eventually we might run out of those perfectly polished original GameCube controllers. The scene will survive of course, but it's strange that something can feel so contemporary and archaic at the same time.

"I've been using the same memory card with my Melee file since I got the game," says McGill. "It's decades old now. It gives it a kind of antique-y feel. It's heartwarming to sit down in front of a SDTV."

eSports is an exploding industry. Everyone from ESPN to Turner Broadcasting wants a piece of the pie. Every major developer and publisher on Earth is currently putting together a game with the distant hopes of attracting the same kind of money percolating in Dota 2, or League of Legends, or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. For years, the idea of broadcasting and funding professional gaming was laughed out of every corporate boardroom on the planet. Today, it's the exact opposite, coursing with enough money for Blizzard to a self-fund tournament with a half-million dollars on the line for a game that's less than a year old.

The Melee scene never had much use for any of that. For 15 years they've played on an old machine with terrible online capabilities, and almost no relevant recognition or assistence from Nintendo. It is a true, organic passion project, the likes of which bridged any gaps of inconvenience or implausibility. The only thing Smash players ever needed was each other.

"One of the good things about being a grassroots community is that we don't need developer support to survive," says Calvin "GimR" Lofton, a player who's watched the Smash scene grow for years. "We've been doing great without that support. A lot of other communities would immediately fail if that developer support left. I think it's pretty awesome how big we've gotten without it."

They'll buy pristine $40 controllers from the turn of the millennium and carry around the same memory card they got for Christmas 15 years ago. It doesn't matter if the world is watching or not. Super Smash Bros. Melee will exist forever, because it'd be crazy to stop now.