Smash The Record

This past weekend one of my favorite smash events wrapped up, the event I speak of is called Smash the Record. Smash the record is my favorite event for a couple reasons, it’s a 3 day event, which is always awesome, it not only features smash but it features speed runs as well which for those who don’t know, speed running is pretty much just trying to beat any given adventure or plot based video game as quick as possible, sounds boring when I say it like that but check out one if you ever get the chance, they’re quite entertaining. Lastly and most importantly StR is entirely a charity event! Yep that’s right, this past weekend both the smash community and the speed running community raised over $50,000 in donations for St. Jude’s children’s hospital in Florida. Now being that this event is entirely charity that means that there were no cash prizes for any of the top 8 placers in any of the smash events, which for this event and the cause it was helping I didn’t think that was such a bad thing. Now being that there was no money to be won at this event also means that a lot of the bigger name players did not enter or attend, that’s right NONE of the top 6 players entered the tournament, and even some of the top 10 players that did enter the event ended up dropping out of the tournament. Truthfully this kind of ticks me off because it really makes you wonder how much more of a priority these players would have made this event had there been money to be won. Also it’s not like the winner of the tournament got nothing, in place of money there were many prizes to be won. Now there is also the other side of the coin to look at, traveling is expensive and time consuming, and at the same time I don’t know what goes on in the lives of these players so they may have also had their own reasons as to why they didn’t enter or attend. But see here’s the thing, last year there was also an StR and at last year’s event we had 3 of the melee gods enter in Hungrybox, mango and Mew2king. At this year’s event both Hungrybox and Mew2king were in the venue and chose not to enter (although Hungrybox explained his reasoning on stream) why? At the same time though with the gods not present at this event it gave some of the other players a chance to shine, we had a player named S2J who plays Captain Falcon get second place at the event and I cannot tell you how longs it’s been since we have seen a C. Falcon do that well at a national event. The tournament was won by a player from SoCal named lucky, he’s a fox player who is a very close friend of Mango’s. That’s really all I have to say about this event, as much as I would have loved to see bigger names go to this tournament it was more about the charity than anything else and it’s also great to see two different gaming communities in both smash and speed running coming together to help such a great cause.