Super Smash Bros. in esports
Professional Super Smash Bros. competition involves professional gamers competing in the Super Smash Bros. series of crossover fighting games published by Nintendo. Organized tournament competition began in 2002 with Super Smash Bros. Melee, released for the GameCube in 2001; however, in the series' native Japan, there have been tournaments as early as 1999 with the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. Later tournaments have featured the other games in the series, with the two largest and most popular Smash Bros. scenes revolving around Melee and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch. Smaller scenes exist for the original game and Project M, a popular fan modification of Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii, and to a lesser extent, Brawl itself. Major Smash Bros. tournaments include the GENESIS, Evolution Championship Series, Super Smash Con and The Big House annual series. Major League Gaming has also previously included Smash Bros. games in its Pro Circuit.
The competitive Smash Bros. community is well known in the wider fighting game community for its decentralized, grassroots scene. No official governing body or tournament circuit exists for professional Smash Bros., a byproduct of Nintendo's historical reluctance to directly promote the scene.
History of competitive ''Super Smash Bros. Melee''
Early years: 2002–2007
The first publicized western Super Smash Bros. Melee tournaments were held in early 2002, centering around the Tournament Go series hosted in California by Matt "MattDeezie" Dahlgren. Due to the lack of an agreed upon standardized ruleset, tournaments in this period often featured wildly different rules, with frequent disputes among competitors regarding the legality of items and the legal stagelist. A standardized ruleset was eventually developed over several years which banned all items and narrowed the list of stages to a select few. On March 1, 2003, the International Video Game Federation hosted the first corporate sponsored Super Smash Bros. tournament, the IVGF Northwest Regionals, won by Jeremy "Recipherus" Fremlin.File:Ken Hoang.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Ken Hoang was widely considered the best Super Smash Bros. Melee player in the world during the early years of the game's competitive scene.The period of 2003 to 2007 is often referred to as the "Golden Age" of Melee; the game was featured in the Major League Gaming Pro Circuit during this period from 2004 to 2006. Ken Hoang was widely considered to be the best player in the world during this period, earning him the nickname "The King of Smash". In addition to Ken, Christopher "Azen" McMullen, Daniel "ChuDat" Rodriguez, Joel Isai "Isai" Alvarado, Christopher "PC Chris" Szygiel, Daniel "KoreanDJ" Jung, and Jason "Mew2King" Zimmerman were considered to be some of the best players at the time. Melee was also included in Evolution Championship Series 2007, an annual major fighting game tournament held in Las Vegas. MLG dropped Melee from its circuit in 2007, however the organization still sponsored a number of tournaments as part of the underground 2007 Smash Series for a year.
Decline: 2008–2013
The Melee competitive scene suffered in the late 2000s, with the game being dropped from both the MLG circuit and EVO amid the release of the next game in the Smash Bros. series, Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008. Brawl replaced Melee in many competitive circuits; however, the former game quickly garnered a poor reputation among much of the competitive Smash Bros. community due to its slower and more defensive gameplay as well as its anti-competitive mechanics such as random tripping. In 2010, MLG picked up Brawl for its Pro Circuit for a year; during this time, Nintendo prohibited MLG from live streaming Brawl matches. The period from 2012 to 2013 is often referred to as "The Dark Age" of competitive Smash Bros. due to the temporary decline of Melee and the subsequent decline in popularity of Brawl. Nevertheless, the period did see some major tournaments such as the inaugural GENESIS in 2009 and the launch of the Apex and The Big House tournament series.Resurgence and the "Five Gods": 2013–2018
Competitive Melee experienced a resurgence in popularity and support after it was again hosted at EVO 2013 after the game won a charity drive to decide the final game to be featured in its tournament lineup. Due to its large turnout and viewership that year, EVO continued including Melee in its lineup for the next five years. The competitive scene was also further popularized by the 2013 release of The Smash Brothers documentary series directed by Travis "Samox" Beauchamp. SmashBoards estimated that in 2014 around 3,242 events featuring a Smash Bros. game had occurred worldwide. This period saw a number of new and revived major tournament series enter the scene, including GENESIS, Super Smash Con, Community Effort Orlando, DreamHack, Major League Gaming, Shine and the Smash Summit invitational series. Other major tournament series included Apex and The Big House. Apex 2015 was officially sponsored by Nintendo of America, marking the first official Nintendo sponsorship of a community-run event while EVO 2016 was the largest Melee tournament of all time, with 2,376 entrants. In June 2014 Nintendo held an invitational Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament at E3 2014 to promote the game, in which various competitive Smash Bros. players competed in a non-standard ruleset. Smash Sisters, an initiative aimed at normalizing the participation of women at tournaments, held its first all-women bracket at GENESIS 3 in 2016.The period from 2013 to 2018 is sometimes referred to as "The Platinum Age" or "The Era of the Five Gods", a reference to the five most dominant players of the era: Jason "Mew2King" Zimmerman, Joseph "Mango" Marquez, Kevin "PPMD" Nanney, Adam "Armada" Lindgren, and Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma. William "Leffen" Hjelte became the first player to defeat all five of the "Five Gods" during this period, leading some to nickname him as "The God Slayer", and causing the top 6 players to become collectively known as the "Big 6". In 2017, Justin "Plup" McGrath became the second player in the game's history to defeat all of the "Five Gods" in tournament competition, also becoming the first player outside of the Big 6 to defeat Armada in a tournament set in seven years.
2018–present
In the late 2010s, the "Five Gods" moniker started to become less relevant as many of the "Gods" stepped back from full-time competition: PPMD went on indefinite hiatus from competition in 2016 citing health issues, Armada retired from singles competition in 2018 and Mew2King semi-retired from serious competition around the same time to focus on content creation and coaching. Leffen also faced several visa-related difficulties in competing in the United States during this time. Referred to by some as "The Chaos Age", the current era has seen the relative decline of the "Five Gods" in tournament placings in favor of newer players, such as Zain Naghmi, Jeffrey "Axe" Williamson and Cody Schwab. Plup's first-place victory at GENESIS 5 in 2018 marked the first supermajor tournament won by a player outside of the Big 6 in several years.The competitive scene was significantly affected in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic, shutting down virtually all in-person tournaments. However, a major milestone occurred in the summer of 2020 with the development of rollback netcode for Project Slippi, an emulated fan-made modification of Melee, which allowed for low-latency online matchmaking for the first time in the game's history. While significantly contributing to the game's accessibility during the pandemic, Project Slippi also brought new legal troubles to the competitive scene, culminating in the cancellation of The Big House 10 in 2020 after the event received a cease and desist notice from Nintendo concerning the event's planned usage of Project Slippi. The cancellation was met with a highly negative reaction from the competitive community, and led to the trending of the "#FreeMelee" hashtag on Twitter. In November 2021, Panda and Nintendo jointly announced an officially licensed Melee and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate North American championship circuit for 2022, the first ever officially licensed Melee circuit. The Big House 10 would become a part of the Panda Cup and was held that year, becoming notable for Masaya "aMSa" Chikamoto's first-place victory over Mango and Hungrybox, marking his first supermajor tournament victory alongside the first major victory for Yoshi in the game's history.
The community's relationship with Panda and the Panda Cup would become strained with the news that Nintendo had allegedly forced the Smash World Tour to be cancelled just weeks before it was supposed to commence in early December, with Panda CEO Alan "Dr. Alan" Bunney accused of sabotaging the event. Follow-up statements from Nintendo and Panda received heavy backlash from the community for lack of transparency, leading numerous Melee players like aMSa and Hungrybox to drop out of the Panda Cup Finale in an act of protest. Players who were sponsored by Panda like Cody Schwab and Plup also announced their departure from the organization. In light of these events, Panda released a second statement announcing that they had removed Dr. Alan as CEO and postponed the Panda Cup Finale due to security reasons.
''Super Smash Bros. Ultimate'' and other games
Competitive scenes have existed for all titles in the Smash Bros. series, with the two largest and most popular modern titles being Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Melee. While both Ultimate and Melee share the same basic gameplay format and style and are often included in major tournaments together, the significant differences in gameplay speed, advanced tech and character matchups have led to the development of intertwined but distinct competitive scenes for the two games. Leonardo "MkLeo" Perez is widely considered the world's best Ultimate player, alongside other top players such as Edgar "Sparg0" Valdez, Gavin "Tweek" Dempsey, Sota "Zackray" Okada, and William "Glutonny" Belaïd, among others.Smaller competitive scenes exist for the original game for Nintendo 64 and Project M/Project+, a fan-made mod of Super Smash Bros. Brawl designed to make the game resemble the faster gameplay style of Melee. Smash Bros. games with previously active competitive scenes include Brawl and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U ; however, in Norway, there are still Brawl events of comparable size to Melee and Ultimate events. Most Brawl and Wii U players have since migrated to Ultimate, with significant overlap between top professional players of the former games and current top professional Ultimate players.