The sounds of button mashing, belly laughs, and players yelling over each other are some of the dominant noises you'll hear at a video game tournament, including Smash Crash, a Super Smash Brothers gathering held recently at Burlington Beer Company.
Sometimes the community side of a tournament like this takes precedence over the competitive.
Winooski resident Duncan Hacker is no stranger to the chaos. He was a frequent fighter at Vermont-based Smash events from the mid-2010s onward.
Duncan hasn’t been able to play as much lately after welcoming a child into his family. Today, his wife watched the baby, so he was free to come down and compete. He reflected on how the game has taken up a large part of his life, but in a good way, and that it was easy to pick back up with familiar faces and catch up on how their lives have progressed in knowing them for almost a decade.
“Being able to come back now and still see these faces that are like five to almost 10 years old, as far as how long it’s gone back, it’s been an incredible time today… coming to these events is really cool because you’ve shared a journey," he said.
This was the second tournament held at Burlington Beer Company, put on by Champlain College and the Wednesday Night Fight Club Esports Dojo — that’s a place where members of all ages learn how to play fighting video games at a competitive level.
For the uninitiated, the original Super Smash Brothers was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. It features combatants from iconic Nintendo games, like Link from The Legend of Zelda, Pikachu from Pokemon, and Mario. There have been a handful of sequels to Smash Brothers; the recent off-campus tournament featured Melee and Ultimate.
Vermont’s competitive Smash Bros scene has been around since 2015, starting on Champlain College’s campus. The range of participants at Smash Crash varied from the typical tourneys on Champlain’s campus, which are usually attended by college-aged men. The WNFC Esports Dojo trains students from grades 4-12, so there were a handful of players on the younger side.
I spoke with three grade-school-aged students who turned the interview around on me, asking me what character I'd like to see in Super Smash Brothers. That's a timeless hypothetical question, one that I have been thinking about since 2001, when I played Super Smash Brothers Melee for the first time on Christmas day with my brother.
And I wasn't the only one at the tournament who was taking a trip down memory lane.
Grant Patterson, the owner of the WNFC Esports Dojo which opened in Essex Junction last year, said that the release of Street Fighter 2 was a critical moment in his childhood that guided the rest of his life and influenced his decision to make a career of facilitating a welcoming video game communities. The dojo — and tournaments like this — are a passion project for him, and a way to help bring the next crop of gamers into the fold.
“You see it from a different vantage point when it's a generation or two younger than you, and you're just like, that's how it was, and that's how it's always going to be," Patterson said. "And if you're there to, like, facilitate a gathering of that, I think there's something really magical and profound about it, and I'm just happy to have helped bring that about.”
There were about 50 players competing in the Burlington Beer tournament, myself included. But even with hundreds of dollars of prize money on the line, it was a friendly environment and the competitive spirit was good-natured.
Winooski resident Sean Soukone, gamertag Joemoezoe, was unsure how he’d fare in the tournament, not playing the game for some years. He said he had no expectations coming into this and that he wanted to have fun most of all.
Smash Crash was a double elimination tournament, and as fate would have it, Sean and I played each other in the losers' bracket. I ended up victorious, and Sean was a bit slack-jawed to be losing to a reporter. He didn't make up any excuses for his loss, stating he definitely needs to practice more if he wants to attend another tournament.
My success was short-lived, however. I ended up losing my next round, going 1-2 in the tournament.
I chatted with another player, Grant Mathews, who was playing some friendly matches between the ranked games. He had already placed in the top eight of the tournament. I should’ve known something was up after he said he’d been playing in tournaments since age 14. As it turned out, he was the top ranked Smash Ultimate player in Vermont, meaning he had the best personal rank from attending local weekly tournaments that take place on Champlain's campus.
Luckily, I didn’t match up with Mathews — gamertag Orango — in the tournament. He plays the same character as me, the space-faring bounty hunter Samus Aran from Metroid. When your opponent plays the same character as you, it's called a mirror match, and losing a mirror match can be an embarrassing thing.
Orango was excited about the following week: Through The Woods, a seasonal tournament at Champlain College that had already had about 80 people signed up for. The tournament was expecting a significant amount of players from Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Apart from being one of the best players in Vermont, Mathews is part of a contingent of local gamers who’ve been visiting neighboring New England states to help build connections between local scenes, and in return members of those scenes are showing up for the Vermont tournaments.
Orango said Massachusetts has the strongest player base in New England, but that the Vermonters deserve some credit, too. "A lot of our guys are taking sets off big name players," he said. "This is the year of Vermont."
Champlain College hosts weekly events for Super Smash Brothers; there's more info on the Discord servers for Melee and Ultimate, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
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