After 2 years of anticipation following the release of the first hit game in the Smash Bros. series, Super Smash Bros. Melee was released by Nintendo in North America on December 2^nd, 2001. Intended to be a party-friendly, free-for all fighting game featuring all of Nintendo's beloved trademark characters including Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, etc.; Melee had broken multiple video game selling records, for Nintendo and the GameCube (the game system that Melee featured in). Not long after its release, a new side to the game began to reveal as players found Melee more as a competitive outlet rather than a laid-back party experience. These players started finding intricacies and pitfalls in development that the actual programmers of the game failed to detect. Over 15 years of play by hundreds of thousands of competitive players a multitude of new discoveries in the game are still made and new ways to play are implemented. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Melee consists of user-friendly controls, an in-depth metagame and physics, and contains both beautiful visuals and soundtrack, which has stood the test of time for 15 years of competitive play and only has more to come.

            When attempting to judge the lifespan of competitive games with how long they will continue to be broadcasted and hold a profitable amount of views in the eSports (electronic sports) community, change has proven to be a pivotal factor. The sad reality of why this is true is because people simply become uninterested when there’s a lack of new content. This means that games such as League of Legends or Counter Strike: Global Offensive are given an edge over games that are a one time release, because these two games, much like other online games, receive updates and new patches - such as new maps or stages and characters to entertain the consumer. Super Smash Bros. Melee, like its predecessor were games that were developed and only modified before release; receiving no changes afterwards. Looking at this factor alone when assessing the survivability of its popularity one may think that the game would be like many trends and blow up for a small period of time and then slowly lose its adoration. Melee came back and served as something that no video game has before; it became an omission to the modern ideology of what the typical fighting-game happens to be. This was done by having the consumers dictate the direction of gameplay, involving the constantly evolving use of new techniques discovered through exploits in the coding of the mechanics.

Shown below, a video detailing the amount of inputs a traditional game has.

The way that Melee works contrary to how other popular fighting games such as ones in the Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat series, is that Melee has a free-form aspect to it. In poetry, there are forms with rulesets such as the haiku or sonnet that at times can restrict the creativity of the poet. Just as in poetry, many popular fighting games have a tendency to have the same negative effect on the player by giving them a fixed amount of possible combos to perform limiting the growth of the gameplay, by trapping players into cycles of monotonous “same-ole, same-ole” styles of play. Even with the updates that these other games receive, these fixed gameplay styles become old faster than they can update. With Melee and the form that it was created in, the player is given a stage to play on and a character with different moves and stats to work with that give an endless variety of possibilities, only limiting them to their own imagination when it comes just to how the character can be played. The moves you have with each character serve to set up the possibility to follow up with any move afterwards, letting you custom-create your own combos as you play. This diversity in playstyle with how combos are strung together increases the options of playing exponentially. In turn, this also allows players to create their own identities within the game community itself - by playing in a style nobody has ever seen before. This is why when you watch professional gameplay you are able to tell who is playing the character, even though it is the same character that many other play; simply by the differences in how they use the tools they were given.

         
   A great advantage that Melee has in the eSports scene, is that almost anyone, players or people who are just learning and seeing the game played for the first time can tell what’s going on. Not only is this because the game itself is very easy to understand, but as millennials, it’s a game that we grew up with. It’s that game that the average teenager, or young adult can look at and go, “Oh, that’s Melee!” because of how popular it already was in casual gameplay before it was popular in competitive play. This look that the game has makes it much less intimidating to play and is a prime reason Melee serves as a gateway into the scene of eSports for many. The familiar faces of popular Nintendo characters previously mentioned with the ego kids developed for themselves beating their little brothers and sisters at the game in the early 2000’s gives many that final push to get out there and try it out.

            All in all, the fact that this wondrous game has been able to solidify its spot in the eSports community against all odds is truly a remarkable accomplishment. Melee, the game that was originally created the be the family-friendly, party game - was never intended to be taken as seriously as it has been in the last decade and a half. The quality of the game is spoken through the expansion of its presence in the eSports scene with its largest tournaments being hosted in luxurious five-star hotels (Such as the renowned Mandalay Bay Hotel and Resort) with hundreds of thousands of live viewers watching their favorite competitors play and receive six-figure salaries for it. Players within the top ten rankings of the game overall, make more than $10,000 in many tournaments winnings multiple times, not including payouts from sponsorships for brands such as Intel, Redbull, and HTC, as well as several others. In itself, it is a new breed of fighting game, and is only growing more popular by the year, being the only video game to have a strong presence in eSports for as long as it has with no updates or patches with a net increase in viewership since release. The game’s flexible playstyle in synthesis with it’s basic framework separates it from every other competitive game allowing the player to push the limits of the game far more than its creators ever intended for, making it the perfect accident. An accident that is, with a positive influence on the gaming community. It transformed from a game with little to no competition, to a game that ended up being on the largest monitor and area of Evolution 2016, just this past July. Never before has a game from the 90’s been as relevant as Melee has today.

            In the past two months alone, over $23,720 have been awarded to the winners of the Evolution tournament just previously discussed. In the entire lifetime of the series, $969,044.00 has been awarded to players (this being across all of the boards though, including other fighting games). This is a tremendous amount of money to be awarded to people who commit hours and hours to better themselves as players, in order to get a shot at potentially breaking out of their assigned brackets, and winning a portion of that prize money. The game Street Fighter alone, awarded more than $100,000 this year at the tournament. When money is added into the equation, an entirely new mood and view of the game and gaming community arises from nowhere, and people start to realize the reality of situation.

            In conclusion, Melee being a game that has completely obliterated the ideology that as games get older, they lose relevancy, has stood the test of time. With it still being one of the most popular fighting games of the decade, the evolution of the game almost unavoidably made it as big as it is today. This proves that the community, compiled of competitive players, newbies, and familiars has revolutionized the game to fit the current age of fighting game content.