Melee future speculation

So 2015 is the second year now that melee is not only an Esport but a pretty popular one at that. This was the first year in quite some time that we see other players catching up to the “gods of melee”. We saw PewPewU defeat Hungrybox in January at Apex 2015, Plup defeated Mango at Evo 2015, Westballz defeated mango at a California local in 2 straight sets in grand finals and of course who could forget Leffen’s rise. With so many of the other players catching up to the top player’s one can only wonder what 2016 will hold for melee. Now as we all know melee is a game that has been around for quite some time now, in December it will reach age 14, and yet even with being out for so long melee continues to grow. A huge question is if this growth will continue in 2016, will we see even bigger numbers at tournaments? Or will things maybe see a slow decline, with the way things have been going in past years though this doesn’t seem to be the case and of course as a fan I want melee to continue to prosper. Even so it still is always a question on everyone’s mind. Now let’s talk about the players. We’ve really started to see a few of the gods start to decline. Most notably Mew2king and Mango. Mew2king’s hands were bothering him at one point in this year, specifically his fingers, he claimed it would hurt to play melee. As for mango we have seen a very inconsistent year from him this year and while having won a few tournaments such as Press Start and Paragon his placings have been dropping form a usual consistent top 3 to now placing more around the 4-8 spots and on a few occasions not even making it to top 8 in such tournaments as HTC Throwdown were he lost to DruggedFox in winners and MacD in losers. Now having been following melee for a very long time it doesn’t surprise me that we are seeing these 2 decline a little bit before everyone else In the top 6, both of them have been playing competitively longer than the other gods and are also the two oldest of the group. I’m being completely serious though, Mango and Mew2king had been winning tournaments since before anyone even knew the names of the other top 4, especially mew2king as he competed way back in the day with notable players such as Ken and PC Chris. So will we see these 2 start to really decline? Perhaps one of them will retire? Or will they completely make me look like a fool and continue to dominate? Now we could speculate about 2016 for hours but I guess we will only truly know when the time comes. Just going to have to wait and see.

(Players mentioned here that were not shown or talked about in the top player introduction post)

MacD

DruggedFox

Ken

PC Chris

Something to note about both PC Chris and Ken is that although they are old school players both have made appearances in recent years especially Ken as he actually returned to competitive play in 2012 and is even a sponsored player now. 

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.