by N5|Calvin

Julian “Zhu” Zhu has been a competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee player since 2005 and has since become one of the top Falco mains in the world. He is currently rank 21 on the Melee it on Me Power Rankings. Zhu is originally from Northern California, but now lives on the East Coast with his girlfriend.

Calvin: So can you tell me when you’d say you became involved in competitive Smash and how you came to be involved in it? Back then I suppose there wasn’t a documentary telling you all about it, so how did you stumble into it?

Zhu: I actually got SSBM the week it came out because my friends and I were fans of SSB64 and naturally wanted to get the sequel. We played it quite a bit but got bored of it at some point because all we did was roll and spam smashes.

I got into competitive smash when I was kinda showed up by another competitive player. I was one of those guys who though he was really good cause I could roll, d-tilt, and f-smash with Falco. This person challenged me and basically whooped be really bad with Marth — chain grabs and everything. It was a surreal experience, like playing a completely different game. This was in 2005, so Ken vs Bombsoldier [videos] came out around that time. She introduced to me those sets, and that’s what I’d say started it for me.

Calvin: You were playing with Falco before entering the competitive scene then, was there a reason you chose this character? If you weren’t playing Falco already do you think those Bombsoldier vs Ken sets would have made you switch to him anyway, or did your friend show you those sets because you were already playing Falco?

Zhu: I don’t remember if I had a particular reason for playing Falco back then, I think I just thought he was cool and gave me the tools to beat my friends — a reliable damage dealer (f-smash) and kill moves (f-smash and d-tilt) haha!

My friend showed me Ken vs Bombsoldier because that was considered the pinnacle of play at the time. After seeing the videos and experiencing this first hand, I actually completely dumped Falco for Marth because chain grabs looked ridiculously powerful and frustrating to play against, so naturally I wanted to do this all my friends. I played Marth for a few months and kept studying the Ken vs Bombsoldier sets in Ken’s perspective and thought to study it from Bombsoldier’s perspective. I suddenly noticed all the cool things he was doing and basically thought it looked really cool play like that, so I dropped Marth and haven’t looked (too far) back! So to answer your question, if Bombsoldier didn’t exist, I think I’d probably still be a Marth main.

Calvin: Is there a particular combo or move you wanted to be able to do when you started out? Like, as a Falco main myself (albeit not a very good one) I was really into learning how to pillar when I first started.

Zhu: OH MY GOD YES. With Marth, I wanted to chain grab a Falco or Fox from 0 [to] death on FD and literally make them cry. I was able to get a few 0 [to] deaths but wasn’t able to make anyone cry unfortunately.

I’m with you on pillaring with Falco. I really wanted to pillar (shine -> dair -> shine -> dair -> etc.) a Fox across FD. My inspiration for this was Bombsoldier doing this to Masashi and some other Foxes of course. Going from spamming rolls and f-smashes to comboing a Fox across ALL of FD was a truly inspiring thing. I wasn’t able to do it on a computer because they don’t DI so one of my initial goals was to do that exact combo string on a person and see what it felt like to be Bombsoldier, even for just a few seconds.

Calvin: I was wondering why you picked Zhu as your Smash tag. Obviously it’s your last name, but why choose that over something like “Hax” or “Darkrain?”

Zhu: I wish I had a good story for this but I don’t. I was going to just make my tag Julian (first name)… but it didn’t fit as a tag ingame so I went with Zhu (last name) instead. I’m kind of glad I decided on Zhu because “Zhuuuuuuuuu” chants make me really happy. Although if I could steal any tag it would be Darkrain, easily my favorite tag of all time in any game.

Calvin: After you got into the competitive scene how long afterwards did you attend your first tournament? Could you describe your whole first tournament experience?

Zhu: I would consider my first true tournament experience to be a teams tournament run by my high school, this was just a few months after finding out about competitive Smash, when I still played Marth. We came into the tournament pretty confident because we thought we were the only people who could play with advanced techniques, which should have given us a huge advantage. This turned out to be true as we comfortably made our way to grand finals.

Grand finals was on a separate day and advertised throughout the school, so a lot of people came by to watch. My friend and I had no idea who the other team was but we assumed they’d be like the others, so we felt pretty confident going in.

We picked our characters — I went Marth, my partner Peach, and the opponents Puff and Sheik. Everyone’s settling in, the crowd is hyped, and… the game starts. I think they got a rest on one of us and comboed / edge guarded the other. At first I thought they just got lucky and that we would easily catch up and bring it back, that they’d start throwing bad moves or suicide like the other moves but… they never did. We scrambled to take back the lead but never did, and so we lost game 1.

Well, what to do? What could we do? We were totally outclassed and didn’t have a particular strategy or counterpick ready since we’ve never played anyone like this. We told each other we could still win, just have to keep our cool and be careful with our stocks… although I don’t know if either of us believed it. We picked stadium and… the Sheik switched to Fox. Fox on Stadium was a good pick even then, unless you run into Peach’s down-smash a bunch of times. We ended up taking some quick stocks off Fox, maintained our lead, and won game 2.

Alright, we got kind of lucky they made a bad pick, but we’ll take it. They picked Dreamland and went back to Puff / Sheik. At this point, we were feeling better about fighting both of them. Don’t panic, don’t rush, play smart. I don’t remember how it went exactly, but we ended up edging them out and winning a very close game 3.

I still consider this one of my most important wins to this day. I got to experience adversity, get demolished by it, and ultimately overcome it (with some luck). Even though the matches themselves weren’t that high level, I got to play in a high stress situation (losing game 1 is still one of the most stressful things I’ve experienced in my life LOL) and I think that really helped my tournament nerves in the future. Not a very exciting story, but I do consider this my first tournament match ever, and still think back to it every now and then!

Calvin: After you started playing competitively and attending tournaments, how long did it take you to become one of the better players in the world? Was there a tournament that made you realize “Hey, I can actually compete with the best” or something along similar lines?

Zhu: The Norcal Biweekly the week before OC3 [Orange County 3] was the when the game finally clicked for me. This was about a year and a half after going to tournaments with ranked players.

In the year and a half, I got into the top 10. I had a few good wins but never really broke out by beating any of the top 5 or placing better than 7th or so at a Norcal Biweekly. I’m actually not really sure what made the difference, but I somehow got 2nd at that particular tournament, beating out many of the top 10 and taking set 1 of grand finals off Silent Spectre, who I really struggled with at the time. I’d say that was the biggest jump I made within a given time.

Calvin: After Brawl came out I know the scene started to die down, was there a point at which you thought you were just going to be done with Melee? Did you ever get into Brawl?

Zhu: I definitely had a time where I was uh… less enthusiastic about Melee around Brawl’s release. We had a feeling Brawl was going to damage Melee a bit (I even released my combo video Happy Feet 3 right before Brawl’s release in anticipation of this), but we weren’t sure how badly cause it really depended on how many Melee players would transition.

Because of this, my friend actually got a modded Wii with the Japanese version of Brawl (this version was released before the English one) to try it out and get the heads start. We spent a good amount of time experimenting, researching, and playing Brawl, even going to a few tournaments (before and after the English release), but we came to the conclusion the game simply wasn’t for us and would rather stick with Melee.

So we kept with Melee and everything turned out alright! Revival of Melee (ROM) was hosted about a year after Brawl’s release, which I’d consider the flagship of Melee’s revival. I think many of the Melee players who had the same thoughts tried out Brawl and ultimately came back around this time. Haven’t really looked back and it’s been smooth sailing since!

Calvin: With the resurgence that the first RoM started, did you ever expect it to grow into what the Melee scene is today?

Zhu: Not. At. All. The farthest I ever thought of was Melee maybe getting back into MLG. No way I’d ever imagine the community being able to put together $90,000 to get into EVO or have 150,000 viewers at the actual event.

Like the game itself, I see the platinum age we’re experiencing as a beautiful accident. We had everything we needed all along — a timelessly deep game, popularity, rich history, social media presence — to have Melee explode but something had to happen to open those doors and tie everything together. The same way wavedashing and l-canceling did that for the game, I see the documentary as doing the same thing for Melee’s recent success. It really brought together everyone who’s ever touched or heard of the game in a way that… well I’m not sure what else could have. Many of us even knew about the documentary but very few people, if any (I wonder if Travis did), would anticipate it having so much impact.

Calvin: This weekend Melee is returning to EVO with 970 entrants and is the third event of the Summer of Smash’s “triple crown.” How do you think you’ll perform?

Zhu: I really, really want to make top 8 because it’s been so long since I’ve broken that barrier at a national (last time was Pound 4 which was in 2010) but I’d say that’s less likely given the top 6 (Mango, Armada, PPMD, M2K, HBox, Leffen) are coming, meaning I’d have to beat at least one of them as well as a bunch of the others including Axe, Hax, etc. Given my recent performances, I’d say I’ll get 17th, plus or minus 2 placing groups, depending on how my bracket turns out.

Calvin: I know there’s a lot of speculation about the top 8 because of all the large tournaments recently. How do you think top players who haven’t been at a large event in awhile, like Javi, Ice and Silent Wolf will perform compared to those who have been going to events like SKTAR, MLG, CEO etc?

Zhu: Of the non-“Gods”, I’d say most of the top 20 have about the same chance, whether or not they competed at the recent big tournaments like SKTAR, MLG, and CEO. I’m going to use “getting into the top 8” as my way to compare these players. For me to confidently feel a player is going to get top 8 with the top 6 in attendance, they’d need to be able to beat some of the top 6. There is only person who comes to mind, including the mentioned lesser active players, is Axe. He’s the only player that comes to mind who has a great record against the top 20 as well as has a good shot against many of the top 6 as he’s taken sets off M2K and HBox and narrowly missed doing the same off Mango, PP and Leffen.

Hax is the next person who comes to mind as he’s shown exceptional consistency against the other top 20 but hasn’t quite been able to take down too many of the top 6, although he’s gotten extremely close. Other than those two, it’s hard for me to separate any of the players from the rest, “active” or not.

Calvin: Can you summarize what it’s been like to be apart of the Smash community all these years and what it means to you? Also how much longer do you think it’ll be a factor in your life?

Zhu: If I had to summarize what being in the Melee community with two words, it’d be tough love. The main thing tying us together is our fascination with a common interest, so the primary source of respect is naturally for the game and how good an individual is at it. This was especially the case in the beginning of Melee, when the general demeanor of the community rougher and had a larger emphasis on tough than love, at least this was my experience of being in Norcal and Socal. I’m not entirely sure if this is ideal or not since I’m sure many people found this intimidating, but I would attribute much of my personal growth to being part of the community, mastering the game, and going through some of the toughest trials I’ve experienced by competing in tournaments. To summarize, growing up with the community was like having a really large extended family consistently of mostly dudes who liked Melee, but we respected each other because we respected the game so everything was aight.

Because I met most of my closest friends through Melee, I don’t really see it leaving my life entirely anytime too soon. Even though Melee is bound to lose tournament popularity over time, whether it’s a year or twenty, you bet I’ll keep a setup and find time to spank people from time to time. I also don’t really consider myself much of a gamer vs strictly a Melee player, so I really don’t see another game replacing it unless it’s super, duper amazing and gives me the same level of accomplishment Melee has.

Calvin: Lastly, I’d just like to ask how does it feel to be in the most famous Melee video of all time, “WOMBO COMBO?” I see you took on the “Poor” tag recently, which I believe is because HomeMadeWaffles says “Poor Zhu” in the video, right?

Zhu: To be honest, I was so used to getting destroyed by Silent Spectre and Tang in teams that I didn’t think much of the combo when it happened. Obviously the video went viral and people made Wombo Combo references to me all the time. Shout outs to everyone who made the video as hype as it was. Honestly out of everyone involved, including Brandon, Phil, Silent Spectre and Tang, I absolutely did the least amount of work, I literally just happened to be there. I’m actually lucky things turned out the way they did. I remember getting comboed and being super close to quitting out right before the knee but chose not to for one reason or another. Man, if I quit out, I would’ve been known as the biggest rage quitter of all time. Luckily, people just say stuff like “Poor Zhu” or “Wombo Combo” when unfortunate things happen to me out of good fun, could’ve been much worse if I have quit out LOL.

And yep, the “Poor Zhu” stuff came from the Wombo Combo like you said. The recent “Poor” stuff actually came from a conversation with Cactuar, Reno, and Milktea. We were discussing how I was a free agent and someone mentioned I should just be sponsored by “Poor”, so I can literally just be “Poor Zhu.” I got the idea to create a Facebook status about getting sponsored by “Poor” and it looks like the joke has caught on a little haha! Since “Poor” is now used for other unfortunate individuals besides me, I thought it was only fair to extend the sponsorship to deserving candidates. So far we have two exceptional recruits, Fiction and Brazil’s 2014 FIFA team, and we’re working extremely hard on scouting for more!

Calvin: Well I’ll be looking forward to seeing Poor Fiction participating in future tournaments then! Jokes aside, thanks so much for taking the time to answer all my questions. Best of luck at EVO and future tournaments.

Zhu: Not at all! It’s been a blast thinking about everything that’s happened. Thanks for the fun questions!

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Hi I’m Aiden “Calvin” McCaig and I like writing about competitive video games and playing Smash Brothers. If you’d like, follow me on Twitter @pkmaster45225

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