Super Smash Bros 64
What was the sitch with the Super Smash Bros scene at Macalester College in the late 2000s?
Up to this point, our website has primarily dealt with on-going situations, in the present tense. This is basically by definition, because the prompt and domain name “what’s the sitch?” contains a contraction for “what is,” and, as you may know, “is” is a present tense form of the verb “to be,” (in contrast with “was,” for example).
Expanding the temporal boundaries of our publication is a risky decision. This will make it more challenging to get through every potential situation before our aging staff becomes too incompetent (and incontinent) to write full sentences. We also don’t know if our readership cares at all about past sitches, which have no bearing on their present concerns. That will almost certainly be the case with the sitch that is to follow.
When high-schoolers are thrown from the parental nest into the brief free-fall of college, many are overwhelmed by the sudden evaporation of boundaries and the flood of new experiences. This is often most apparent with sex, drugs, and of course, rock n’ roll. Naïve students arrive on campus, take their first drink or toke, tongue-kiss a few people, and realize no one is going to stop them from doing it again the next day. A relatively self-destructive period follows, as they learn to limit these often fun, often intoxicating, often distracting behaviors to not unhealthy levels. Sometimes this self-work takes longer than the four short years of undergraduate education.
In my case, video games filled this post-adolescent void (among other things). I had not grown-up with a game system in my parents’ house, relegated to playing PlayStation and Nintendo64 at the houses of my luckier friends or cousins. The summer before college I bought a used N64 on a whim, along with a hefty old tube TV. I didn't understand that the impending freedom would overwhelm my ability to turn off the bright colors and catchy tunes of Super Smash Brothers.
I was given a single my freshman year on the 5th floor of the most frayed dorm on campus, know affectionately by its inhabitants as the “Duprojects.” I was initially disappointed, as I would not have the seminal college experience of a freshman roommate. But over the first weeks of living on campus, I quickly realized it was an extraordinary stroke of luck. My friends could be over at all hours without fear of upsetting a roommate. Once established as a definitive hangout spot, my dormitory became ground zero for the intensive late-90s video gaming that was to follow.
Our decision to almost exclusively play Smash was not conscious, but rather, organic. If five or six friends are trying to hang and play vids, the group needs a four person game with a fast pace and quick turnover, so onlookers don’t lose interest. Fierce competition is also required, to drive rapid improvement and elicit shit-talking. And, again, my room had only an aging, not-so-flatscreen TV, unsuited for advanced gaming systems. These features narrowed our choices down to N64 games such as Bond, Smash, Kart, maybe NFL Blitz, Perfect Dark... a relatively short list.
To a greater extent than the other N64 game options, Super Smash Bros has an almost endless range for continued improvement. There is no ceiling. Mastering the basics is just that, and still requires hours of dedicated training. Following a good understanding of simple A or B-button maneuvers with each of the Smash characters, and perhaps becoming comfortable combining those with some directional smashes, one still has to train their thumb to never miss on an Up-B off the edge, to R-roll with agility, to down-A opponents at the right moment, to R-grab from close range and from distance… there is much to know. That is not even to mention the suite of moves available by decreasing the directional force applied to the joystick, subtle actions known as “softies.” The nuance of thumb-skill, the quickness of decision-making required… it boggles the mind.
Take a quick spin down the Youtube wormhole that is professional Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 64 if you want to see what happens when you never stop honing your Smash skills. Be careful; your face may melt.
Many games have built-in chance mechanisms, and often these disadvantage the player in the lead. This is an attempt at leveling the playing field to make the game fun for everyone. In Smash this is true to some extent, when in-game items are turned on (such as beam swords, Pokémon balls, land mines, etc.), as well as on some levels where there are random acts of damage sent down from the Smash Gods (be they tornadoes or laser gun ships or strong gusts of wind, etc.) But, in Smash, you can turn off items, and can learn to appease the Smash Gods (usually with a quick sacrifice, or by not standing still for too long) thereby eliminating much of the luck from the game, leaving all outcomes up to skill and politics. This also makes the game ideal for serious and sustained competition.
Smash also has an aesthetic that is not quantifiable, but is perhaps the most compelling reason why we played it, unblinking, for hours on end. It has a texture, a springiness, a tumbling swirl of primary color and pleasing angles. Pure joy emanates from that glowing space. The physics of the Smash World are, in many ways, more perfect than the physics of real life, and with far are fewer variables. Players bounce in sweeping arcs across perfectly leveled platforms. Punches connect, sending opponents flying in predictable patterns through the air, patterns that can be learned, internalized, understood, until anything is possible, so long as you have a controller in hand. I can throw a Poké Ball with such precision across the clear skies of the Hyrule Castle, MLB scouts would take notice… until they realized I was a lo-fi animated Donkey Kong, not a human baseball player.
There was a night, early in our Smash years, where we began to see the game for what it was. A few of us had been playing off and on, testing out the waters, maybe starting to feel the draw. But it wasn't yet a certainty that we would spend the majority of our screen time over the next few years playing the game. One night, four or five of us were in my single in Dupre, and it clicked. Game after game, the competition was intense, the acrobatics were beautiful, the combinations were dizzying… true skill was on display. We grinned knowingly at each other after one especially spectacular match. An electricity was in the air, in the controllers, in our hunched shoulders and our sore thumbs. We kept Smashing for another hour or two, a very long sesh at that point in our careers. There weren’t many words exchanged, but we all knew that this was the game, and it would become important for our happiness, and our self-worth, to be very good at it.
Word spread down the halls of the dormitory that Smash for 64 was going down most nights of the week in my room. This was a popular game years before, and a few other folks came to try their hand in the arena. We had only just unlocked the Ness and Captain Falcon characters when a friendly guy swung through who played as a Ness, with the bumblebee colors. This was a revolutionary moment in our collective Smash history, akin to the introduction of gunpowder to European warfare. He showed us the power of Ness, and a new technique for stomping opponents to their death off the edge. Only a few characters had an adequately powered aerial down-A to pull this off, and Ness was one of them. The bumblebee Ness taught us a very important lesson, and left the arena in disarray after a night of total carnage. We had been bested, shown that there was much to learn, and that the world of Smash was much larger than my little dorm room. We found that the only way to Smash-improvement was through humility and loss.
I began to practice alone, to the detriment of more traditional classroom-based studies. The computer bots were nowhere near as good as human competition, but they were predictable. This made them good dummies for honing combos, for perfecting touch and mechanics and spacing.
During this era of Smash for 64, we had weeks of rapid development, in physical skill and game theory, followed by plateaus that sometimes felt just as long. To unlock the next level of play, hours were spent in research, development and training. Eventually, one player would discover the value of a previously ignored move, or someone would master a very difficult sequence of strikes. Then this innovation would spread like wildfire, others would iterate further, and still others would start working on an effective counter-move against the new trend. There was often a rock-paper-scissors sequence to these developments. In the end, each new skill had to be practiced until they were second nature, until they could be performed unconsciously, in a split second, with 99% accuracy.
We all chose characters who we had the best chance of winning with, be it Ness, Kirby, Pikachu, Samus, and even a few Captain Falcos. But there were objectively different classes of characters, based on the power of the strikes, as well as their ability to jump back to the safety of the platform from off the edge. For example, in order for a Link to win in a one-on-one battle with a Kirby or Fox or Ness, that Link player would have to be significantly more skilled. Some characters were better prepared for victory. But, many of the objectively lower-tiered characters were enjoyable to play, as long as a consensus was reached. In order to even the playing field, we would often announce “Jiggly Battle!” or “DK Battle!” of “Link Bahhtle!” just prior to a match, in the character selection screen. These were exciting changes of pace, though never as important as the battles that took place with our most powerful, primary characters.
We rapidly became proficient with each character. Many have overlapping movements, but each moves differently enough to make transitions difficult and skill intensive. This led to the invention of the ultimate Smash Marathon: a Tour de Smash, consisting of 12 battles in a row, one with each character. This could take 90 minutes or more, depending on who was playing and the number of lives chosen. I completed the first undefeated Tour de Smash on the day Michelle Obama came to speak at our school, in 2008. Really epic and courageous stuff, all around.
From these homogenized character battles, we all become comfortable with one color for each character. For example, I was always the green-orange Ness, the Wizened (grey) DK, the original green Link, the Vikings (purple) Falco, the Painter-suit Mario (blue, inverse-from-the-original overalls), green-party-hat Pikachu, etc. This became fixed, and very important. If two players disagreed on who had official claim to a particular uniform color, they would do battle with that character, with the winner taking the color of their choice forever more.
One fateful winter, a legendary battle for colors took place, a battle of good versus evil, of freedom versus tyranny, of David versus Goliath. One player, who we’ll call David, routinely selected black-suit Captain Falcon as his primary character. This was his choice even though Falco has unfavorable one-on-one match-ups against many of the top characters. Captain Falcon is brave-at-heart, powerful, and undeniably cool, but doesn’t have all the tools to consistently win battles against the likes of Ness, Pikachu, or even Kirby. So our friend who almost always battled as black-suit Falco also lost quite a bit. But, not unlike Falco, he was courageous and ready to fight for what he believed in.
There was another player, who we’ll call Goliath, who was consistently among those getting the most kills and the most wins. His primary choice of character was the red-hat Ness and no one was going to challenge him for it. A skilled controller playing as an elite Smash character. But this Goliath wanted more. Even though Captain Falcon was perhaps his third or fourth-most played character, when he did play as Falco, he was unsatisfied with the colors left for him. He wanted the black-suit Falco, even though this was the primary character and uniform of our other friend. This Goliath not only wanted control over a different style of Falco; he also wanted to take another’s Smash-identity.
The original black-suit Falco, the defendant, was a huge underdog, even though the battle would be Captain Falcon versus Captain Falcon. He hadn’t put in the hours that the would-be usurper had, he didn’t have the killer instinct, and, frankly, he was used to losing. But he had never before faced an existential threat such as this. The black-suit Falco was allowed to pick the level and the items; that seemed fair, given that his clothes were about to be literally taken off of his back. He chose to fight at Sector Z, the spaceship home of Star Fox, and a relatively neutral environment. Items were turned on, even the beam swords.
The battle was tense and explosive. The stakes were palpable. Black-suit Falco came out calm and in-control, with the focus of someone fighting for their life, while the challenger Falco seemed slightly unprepared. Early in the clash, black-suit was able to pick up a beam sword, a powerful item, especially in the long-arms of a Captain Falco. We, the spectators, were on the edge of our seats, rooting for the black-suit Falco to triumph over unwarranted aggression. Quickly, from the force of his determination and his beam sword, the black-suited hero of the people went ahead by a few lives. But we all knew how quickly momentum could shift during a battle, and that no lead was safe. Once on the back-foot, on the run, even a large advantage could disappear quickly.
A series of well-timed Falcon-kicks brought the challenger closer. But, instead of letting this discourage him, the black-suit Falco went back on the offensive. He brought the fight to this Goliath, took him to the edge, and threw him off. David had won; he had legal claim to black-suit Falco from that day forth. It was a great victory for him, and an historic day for our whole community.
Politics played an outsized role in the outcome of battles when four players were involved. For those unfamiliar, Super Smash Bros is usually played in a free-for-all format, where attacks against any of the four players in the arena are allowed at any time. There are no built-in rules on how much one must attack any other. This unregulated environment leads to all manner of alliances, treachery, taunting, hiding and vendettas, all of which were expected in different amounts from each of the familiar contestants. And, of course, no matter how well you worked with others, no matter what agreements were reached, in the end, there can only be one victor.
The political landscape and maneuvering during our years of intense Smash-play is too deep a topic for one essay; PhD dissertations have been written about less. Individual rivalries developed based on in-game threat-level, or because of a character choice perceived to be unbalanced or annoying. Subtle feuds were also born out of off-the-field disputes; sometimes it was hard to remember what was real life and what was a Smash battle. There were long arcs to these competitive relationships, shaped by innumerable in-game and out-of-game interactions between rivals.
Within this broad and dynamic political environment, brief spurts of collaboration and, more often, bitter treachery also took place. Even between two historically agreeable combatants, in the course of a battle, one player might feel as though the other took unfair advantage when they were in a weakened position, or they may feel like the other was pursuing them to an unreasonable extent instead of also focusing on the two other players involved. Sometimes, when a player felt they had been treated unfairly, an official “vendetta,” was announced.
The definition of a vendetta is “a blood feud in which the family of a murdered person seeks vengeance on the murderer or the murderer's family.” That is exactly what this was, for Smash 64. To the exclusion of all other priorities, including winning the actual match, including their own character’s health and well-being, a player on a vendetta would focus all of their energy and blood-lust on hunting down and launching their target off of the platform, into cold and unforgiving space. Some players were quicker to announce a vendetta than others, so great care had to be taken in battle with them, as even an accidental move could be interpreted as a slight against their honor, and grounds for a vendetta.
There were also frequently collective political decisions made during games. If one player was up by a few lives on everyone else, the hunt was on, at least until the score was closer to even. Similarly, if everyone was down to one life, the game in the balance, two players may form an alliance to take down a third, especially if there was one who had a clear advantage in skill or character power-level. Occasionally, there were time-periods of character-specific discrimination, where, for example, anyone who played Ness would, because of the prevailing political discourse, feel the urge to hunt, for example, anyone who was playing as Kirby. These collective actions were an important way for the group to communicate unwritten attitudes and norms of conduct. Needless to say, we didn’t always agree.
During our years devoted to Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 64, we learned much about that vivid, bouncy, polygonal, and surprisingly violent game. But we also learned about ourselves. We learned about friendship, about navigating a complicated and competitive adult world, about skill development, about the rewards of hard work and dedication to a cause, about anger, and about forgiveness. Could we have spent all of those in-game hours on a healthier, more productive activity, with more real-world application? How dare you ask. And, honestly, I’m not sure. We were able to send avatars of ourselves into a safe, virtual environment to compete, to collaborate, to test the boundaries of interaction, to battle… and then, after many hours, we could turn the console off and return to the physical world, a little more confident, a little more prepared for the unexpected, be it a new homework assignment, a job interview, or a surprise laser gun attack from a cartoon spaceship.
Eventually the frequency of our play dwindled. We had reached such heights that to even maintain our level of awe-inspiring skill and control took hours of play per week. If one player was busy with school, or played FIFA on Xbox for a few afternoons, when they returned to Smash they couldn’t perform in the way we were used to. Frustration increased. We could all see the course this was taking. As a group, we had reached a final Smash plateau, one that could not be overcome. We all had more going on, in school, in our personal lives, in the “real” world, than when the journey began. We couldn’t devote any more to Smash, and therefore, we had to let it go. We still continued to battle on occasion, but the tone had shifted. An era was over.
I don’t remember feeling sad when this transition occurred. I remember feeling proud. And I still do. About what we accomplished those years, in those dorm rooms, with those controllers. We’ve all gone on to have a lot of success in our various careers and relationships. I don’t think that is a coincidence.
