Hey everybody, NEG|Yeroc here, and I have noticed lately that a lot of people have questions about how to grow their local scenes. I think this is a great topic that people should be talking about, because having strong local scenes is the foundation that feeds into a thriving worldwide Smash community. As a veteran player, TO, and community leader, I have a few things I think I can say on this subject, so I decided to write a few articles that I think will help people out. I want to start this blog off with a bit of exposition of some of my own time in the Smash scene, mainly focusing on the earlier periods, when I was most actively contributing to the growth of the North Carolina scene. Throughout this, I will try to highlight important points that I plan to revisit in later posts, and explain why I feel they are important to community involvement. I will also be doing feature posts, where I talk about more concrete elements of scene-building, such as finding venues for events, or organizing training sessions for your group. But I think it is valuable to frame my narratives a little bit to give you readers a sense of why I feel the way I do about certain things, before I get to them. So we’re going to start at the beginning. Before eSports, before Smashboards (for me at least), even before tournaments. Before all of the things you may take for granted today, there was the inspiration that started it all.

The Casual Days and the Advent of the Online Community

Bet you can’t look at this picture without that song popping into your head. Ahh, nostalgia…

The announcement of Smash64 was a watershed event in my life, both as a gamer and otherwise. I remember seeing that commercial featuring the Turtles song and thinking to myself “this game is going to change my life.” Pretty soon, Smash was just about the only game my group of friends and I would play. When the Gamecube came out and Melee was released, I didn’t have a setup of my own so I actually went to the store to buy a controller so that I could play the game at my friend’s house who did. This is a foreshadowing of one of the themes of this article, and a subject that I will expound in a future post. That subject is dedication, and its importance to the viability of your scene. Like many other players who ventured forth into the world of competitive Smash, I was easily the most dedicated of all my friends.

After we discovered online forums at GameFAQs in mid 2002, a whole new world was opened up to me. I, along with one of my friends, quickly became involved with the Stadium mode rankings. We dabbled in Home Run Contest and Break the Targets, but we predominantly played MultiMan Melee, holding several GF records in Endless and Cruel Melee in the early days of the rankings. It wasn’t long, however, before the idea of hosting tournaments spread from Smashboards, and despite the huge flame wars of early 2003 between GameFAQs and Smashboards I quickly re-embraced the notion of playing Smash against another person.

The original Melee Stadium Rankings database, still live here.

Founding a Scene

I met JV3X3, the founder of the Michigan scene and later a major player at MLG during its heyday with Melee, when he decided to move to Charlotte, NC, for six months. He came over to my parents’ house and played with my friends and me. Like most everyone except for Liquid`Ken who has a story like this, he was better than we were, but not by that much. We didn’t get destroyed or anything. But this fateful meeting helped inspire the desire to build a tournament community in NC, and it wasn’t long before we held the first tournament in the state at my apartment, attracting a mind-blowing total of 7 people. I will talk about some of my experiences with hosting this event and others in a later post, such as spending twice as much money as I brought in from venue fees on snacks that no one ate. In spite of these shortcomings, we soldiered on.

My connection to JV also helped me get more involved in the online community. I got into the Melee Back Room at a time where many decisions that would eventually shape the current landscape of the competitive ruleset were taking place. I was talking to players from all over the world about what elements of the game we wanted to promote, and those we wanted to dissuade, in order to make the game more appealing to newer players. As the Smash Documentary alluded, in those days we played a great many more stages than we do now, and we even had the occasional items-on event. I actually have quite a few things I can say about what it takes to develop rulesets in Smash games, so I will save this subject for yet another post in the future, but the main point I want to illustrate here is that my conversations with other players helped broaden my perspectives about both what Melee was as a game, and the size of the community with which I associated. It helped me establish a growth mindset when thinking about where the scene was and what it was doing.

Setting the Tone

Another thing that being involved with the online community helped me do was reach out to players in my local area and encourage them to get involved in the community too. I would argue that this was actually the single most important contribution that I have ever made to NC Melee, and even the national scene. Enthusiasm is infectious, and by demonstrating my own dedication (there’s that word again) I helped inspire them to do the same. Through the forums, I got in contact with several players in a couple cities around the state and I was eager to go out and meet them and introduce them to the idea of competitive Melee, just the same as JV did with me. Many of these players eventually started hosting tournaments of their own, and some of these players (one of them is EG|PPMD’s roommate) are even still active today.

A photo from a house tournament in NC circa 2007.

I even helped get other states’ scenes going. Around this same time, JV and I drove to Atlanta to attend a tournament at Georgia Tech. There we met a handful of Florida players that had actually traveled out to California for some of Matt Deezie’s tournaments. We also met a trio of high school students, among them GA Wes, who later admitted to me that meeting us at that event is what inspired him to host Smash Aid, which became Georgia’s first tournament series eventually featuring appearances by the Newlyweds and even the formerly-top player in Australia, Kupo.

The important thing to remember here is no one builds a community alone, it takes a village. If you notice, most every person I mentioned eventually became more than just a player, they took on expanded roles in the community and helped out where they were needed to support the scene. I will talk about some of these stories in another post as well.

Wrap up

I still have more stories about my early days in the Melee community, but this is enough for you all to get started. To close, I quickly wanted to go back to my point about dedication. All of these stories feature persistence and initiative, action on both mine and others’ parts to help actualize the dream of a bigger, better Melee community. So with that, I hope you are inspired to get started on building up your own communities, and I look forward to seeing the results.