Tournament Mode (SSBM)

Tournament Mode, referred to on the main menu as Tournament Melee (トーナメント乱闘, Tournament Melee) and sometimes retroactively called Tourney Mode to match the names of its successors, is a Multiplayer feature in Super Smash Bros. Melee. It is split into three sub-modes - Tournament, Loser Out and Winner Out.

Tournament

In Melee's tournament mode, players battle against each other in a Single-Elimination Tournament bracket. Multiple settings can be adjusted.

• The number of competitors in a tournament (Up to 64)
• The number of computers and humans in a tournament
• How many players fight in each tournament match (Limited by the number of controllers that are connected)
• How stages are selected
• The CPU level of computer players (Universal Levels 1-9 as well as a randomly assigned option)
• Individual custom rules for matches

Once the tournament is set up, the game automatically proceeds through the Single Elimination Bracket until a winner is determined.

Loser Out

This mode is also played in turns, but unlike Tournament, where the game ends when a final winner is proclaimed, this lasts until the player decides to stop playing. After each match, the loser has to pass their controller to the next player in the queue, and cannot play again until it is their turn again. An extension of this mode is Winner In, where multiple losers are eliminated after each match, depending on the number of players in each match.

Uniquely, if the player uses ++ to select their character for this mode, they are entered as "Random", which assigns a random character with random costume for every match. Their character icon is represented by Ditto.

Winner Out

Winner Out could be seen as an extension of Loser Out, as it operates in the same way, except the winner of each match has to pass their controller on and return to the queue. The random character feature is also present.

In competitive play

Despite being specifically designed for tournaments, this mode is almost never used for large scale tournaments. The limit to 64 players and every player needing to use the same system would make tournaments inefficient and time-consuming. Brackets being restricted to single match sets, single-elimination and random seeding, as well as the inability to change characters between games is also inconducive to competitive preferences, and thus other options have been used over the years like TioPro, Challonge, Start.gg, or even writing the bracket down by hand.

See also

• Tourney (SSBB)
• Tourney (SSBU)