The DotBlog: Introductions!

Welcome! My name is Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski. You may know me as a TO, a streamer, a commentator, or as a competitor. My most recent endeavor has been the most challenging out of anything I have done with nearly a decade spent in our community: The Melee Games. It has taken a demanding role in my life, and for good cause! Allow me to introduce you to this project through the DotBlog. I will be utilizing this blog weekly, every Wednesday at 12pm EST, to provide you updates pertaining to The Melee Games. This post will go over how TMG came into existence and catch us up to where it is now!

The Melee Games (TMG): What & How?

TMG is an intercollegiate Super Smash Bros. Melee circuit that is currently underway in the northeastern United States. We are in our second season, having begun the first season in February 2014.

The beginnings of TMG were simple. EVO had passed, The Smash Brothers was all anyone could talk about, and the New England Melee Facebook Group contained ~350 members. We learned about Game Over, a weekly game night in Boston, and I began to run Melee tournaments at it. Multiple new players attended these events, with a good deal of them being local college students. In order to promote their growth in the community I started to utilize school names to help players stand out a little more and for students to notice there are other players at their school. (ex. MIT | XPilot, NEU | Squible, UMB | Klaps.) This lead to a good deal of connections being made that may have otherwise not been.

The sheer number of participants that had never before attended events was phenomenal, and in November 2013 we experienced the largest Friday night tournament we have ever seen: Northeastern Smash Attack. A record 108 people flooded through the doors of Northeastern University, much to the shock of the TOs. The event was a success, rivalries were created, and friendships were made.

I noted there was potential for something larger, something to involve the students in the smash community even further. After some discussion with SolidJake (@SolidJakeGG) a plan for TMG was created. By January 2014, registration was live. A school qualified to participate if it reached five players or more. The initial predictions were that we’d have 6 participating schools from around Boston. To my shock The University of Connecticut was the first school to qualify with The University of Massachusetts Boston not far behind.

Within 20 hours, 8 schools had already signed up, and after about 2 weeks of signups we ended with 10 schools and 137 players. A bracket was made from randomized seeding and Game Over was set to be the stage for the matches. Week by week 2 to 3 Crew Battles took place, crowding our venue and generating tons of shouts and jeers. The finals took place at Northeastern Smash Attack 2, where over 200 people packed the halls of Northeastern University to set a record turnout for a 1-day tournament.* UMass Boston and MIT faced off for bragging rights as the top school in New England in an intense Grand Finals match.

I wont spoil anything, but OH MY GOD KAIJU!

Where are we now?

TMG quintupled in size from the spring to the fall with the assistance of my dear friend Jesse “HectoHertz” Hertz (@HectoHertz), Host of the Nebulous tournament series and Co-Host of the Justice tournament series. Together we brought TMG outside of New England and into the entire Northeast! Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey schools (known as the Tri-State division) started to sign up, and in total 30 schools qualified. New England saw an increase in participating schools, and doubled in size with 20 schools participating for the fall season.

We put together two brackets, one for New England and one for Tri-State, and have been running them concurrently since mid-September.

New England is about to have a Grand Finals match at the Boston University Smash Tournament on November 22^nd. MIT and UMass Boston will yet again be facing off for the top spot in NE.

Tri-State will be seeing a major weekend on November 15th with two Quarter-Finals and a Semi-Final match taking place. The University of Pittsburgh and The University of Pennsylvania will be facing off to close out the Pennsylvania section of the bracket, while Rutgers and the New Jersey Institute of Technology will be closing off the New Jersey section of the bracket. The winner of each match will face off to determine who will face Columbia or Cornell in Grand Finals. You can tune in to the matches this Saturday, November 15^th, at 3pm EST on http://www.twitch.tv/pghneohsmash.

Ultimately, the TS and NE division winners will be competing at Apex 2015 to see who the best in the Northeast is! The bulk of this season of The Melee Games is only weeks away from completion, and there’s a lot more to expect from us in the spring. That is not to say that there is not more work to be done before finals, though! The DotBlog will be used to catalogue the progress of our growing team on a week-by-week basis.

Stay tuned for releases every Wednesday at 12pm EST. If you have any suggestions, criticism, or ideas for the blog please feel free to contact me @DotZeb or at www.facebook.com/MattDotZeb

Feel free to help Support TMG by Liking us on Facebook, Subscribing on YouTube, or Following us on Twitch!

Thanks to Ten and PGH HouseWife for their help in editing this.

*This is until Mayhem broke this record. Proud of you, MacD, but I’m coming for it.