by MIOM|Scar

The Gods of Melee…

Regardless of who coined the term, for some time now many smashers have referred to Mango, Armada, PPMD, Mew2King, and HBox as the gods of Super Smash Bros. Melee. I was an early adopter of this term and want to explore what it’s meant, past present and future.

Like so many other SSBM tales, this story starts one year ago at Evo 2013. But not where you might expect.

Super Street Fighter 4 Top 8

Watching SF4 at Evo was beautiful. It was a familiar feeling – we aren’t strangers to watching extremely high level gaming. But Evo was so polished, so refined.

A few specifics come to mind. First off, “top 8” was a real thing. The players who achieved the top 8 spots knew they earned their place on the final stage on day 3. “The Final Stage” was a concept that this community celebrated far more than we ever did.

Hundreds watched in a room with literally no setups. We’ve had good crowds form during finals matches, but the focus on the main stage was way more intense. And the crowd interaction was so immersive… this has more to do with the kind of game AE is, but reciting ultras (Seichuzen Godanzuki! and HEAT!) was so awesome. It was a bigger version of when we “Aye!” chaingrabbing sequences.

But one thing stuck with me more than those examples. It was this community’s stories. Their legends. Their gods.

I felt a certain awe knowing that I was in the same room as Daigo, and I obsessively watched Haitani’s Makoto (the only reason I ever considered picking up the game). But the world of Street Fighter 4 really came alive after hearing the commentary and learning that those two players were only 2 of the 5 Japanese Gods of Fighting Games. I look back at watching Evo 2013 and feel a sense of gravity. Like I was truly watching history.

The fact is that the 4 gods in attendance didn’t actually win the tournament. Here they are in bold.

1. DM|Xian (Gen)
2. MCZ|Tokido (Akuma)
3. Infiltration (Akuma, Hakan)
4. EG|PR Balrog (Balrog)
5. Haitani (Makoto)
5. HORI|Sako (Ibuki, Evil Ryu)
7. AvM|GamerBee (Adon)
7. MCZ|Daigo (Ryu)

For me, that was even cooler. It implied, to me, that there was a rich history to this community. That at one point in the past, these players were gods.

 

Stay tuned for part 2! I’ll share my thoughts on our “gods”, including why I think they deserve the honorific, and my reaction to some of them falling from the absolute top tier of competition.

-Scar