Community

The history of the Smash community goes as far back as the series itself, as there were always groups of dedicated fans around the world that came together over the love of the game. However, these groups were small and fragmented due to no easy forms of communication before the widespread use of the internet and documentation being sparce due to a lack of foresight. While websites like Nintendojo were posting articles at the time and Nintendo themselves were dabbling with using the internet, the infrastructure was not there yet.

This started to change in the early 2000’s with the creation of Smashboards and GameFAQs, which became major intersections for playing and discussing the Super Smash Bros. franchise. Larger tournaments also started to pop up around this time, with Matt Deezie’s short lived but influential Tournament Go series often considered a turning point. The competitive continued to grow with Melee's inclusion in professional tournament circuits such as MLG in 2006 and again at EVO in 2007^[2]. The creation of social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and later Twitter and Twitch further expanded the community, as the ability to connect with mainstream culture was easier than ever. This also turned figureheads of the community into celebrities, particularly well known competitive players. The creation of the Global Smasher Compendium (now discontinued), a successful petition for Melee to be broadcast at EVO^[3], and the first unofficial community census in 2013.

Nintendo themselves have also directly participated with the community they helped create and indirectly cultivate. Early examples include many members submitting Target Smash! and Home-Run Contest high scores as well user-generated content to the Brawl Smash Bros. Dojo!! while it was still being updated. Many tournaments have also been officially endorsed and sponsored by Nintendo. The community is also partly responsible for some of the changes seen in newer Smash Bros. titles such as the inclusion of the third party characters Sonic in Brawl, Mega Man and Bayonetta in Smash 4 and Sora in Ultimate by submitting requests and participating in polls.

Today, the Smash series has an incredibly large and diverse community behind it, arguably the largest community for any fighting game. Tournaments of many types and sizes frequently occur around the world, all games have their own active modding scenes, and discussions about the countless topics related to the series never seem to end. There are many proposed reasons as to why the community is so strong. A commonly accepted theory is that the series itself is generally inviting to players of all skill levels with its large roster and simple to use but difficult to master gameplay. The fact that it is also a crossover series means that several pre-established communities come together and form a sense of comradery around sharing their own favorite series. Another theory is that the community has always been grassroots in nature, forming and growing by their own without the help of any outside entity. While there are pros and cons to this situation, it gave the community an amount of resilience and ingenuity few others can claim to have.

Like most other communities, the Smash scene has seen its fair share of controversies and hardships both minor and major. While the causes and effects have varied wildly in type and severity, they have all shaped the scene into what it is today.

Classic Vs. Modern

Throughout the early 2000’s, Super Smash Bros. Melee was honed and mastered as a fast paced, highly technical game that involves exploiting the game to increase the skill ceiling to a level no one could have predicted. When Super Smash Bros. Brawl released as a deliberately slower, more casual friendly game with most exploits removed, it was immediately met with a mixed reception by the competitive scene. The quality of both titles aside, a vocal group showed disdain towards the new title and took these changes as a sign that they were not welcome or approved by Nintendo. This created a major schism in the community between those that preferred to stick with what they already had and preferred and those that moved forward along with Nintendo. While this divide has partially repaired since then with future titles attempting to create gameplay that acted as a compromise between the two styles and both sides praising the games for doing so, animosity between the two camps still exists and may never fully heal.

Community Vs. Nintendo

While the Smash community was created on a mutual passion for a series they cherish, Nintendo has not always shown the same amount of love and respect in return. While the times the company has supported the scene have been acknowledged and appreciated, these instances are relatively sparce compared to the opposite situation. Masahiro Sakurai himself has voiced his disappointment in how the Melee metagame developed over time, specifically pointing out that he believes the game became too technical and reliant on exploits to be enjoyed. This opinion is what inspired the drastic gameplay changes to Brawl, as he wanted a game that everyone can enjoy regardless of skill level. As mentioned above, this put off many fans that like the technical aspect of Melee, who also pointed the hypocrisy of his “enjoyable at all skill levels” by intentionally excluding a significant group of fans to attract others. Sakurai’s efforts paid off in the long term, as Brawl became the best-selling fighting game for over ten years at 13.32 million units sold, but his actions did contribute to the aforementioned schism.

An early example of Nintendo directly butting heads with the community happened at EVO 2013. After a massive push to add Melee as a main stage event, fans created the largest donation pool of any contender at over $94,000. However, Nintendo contacted EVO three days before the start of the event and blocked the game from being played. The swift and immediate backlash from this decision was intense enough for Nintendo to reverse their decision and Melee enjoyed a main stage presence for several years afterwards.

Nintendo has particularly gone after the modding and emulation communities, frequently forcing community members to take down passion projects, whether they can enforce those demands or not. The highest profile example is Project M, a mod that gained significant traction in the competitive scene, to the point of major tournaments hosting brackets specifically for the mod. The mod ceased active development on December 1, 2015, with members of the team saying it was done out of fear for legal ramifications of making a gray market product.

A more recent example is the incident with the cancellation of The Big House Online. Before the tournament could begin, Nintendo wrote a cease-and-desist letter to the venue, forcing the event to be shut down. The reason given was that the online aspect forced the Melee bracket to resort to emulators like Dolphin and Project Slippi, which Nintendo openly disapproves of. This spawned #FreeMelee, and later #SaveSmash, to trend across the internet with enough traction to be picked up by famous influencers and news outlet. It even bled over into other communities, with a notable example being the finals of an official Splatoon tournament livestream being canceled likely due to several members having nametags that reference the movement in some way. This caused most of the teams to simply walk out and join a fan-made tournament, canceling the official finals.

Widespread DDoS attacks on community sites

On 4 May 2011 Smashboards had its index page replaced by an automated script that exploited vBulletin software. A replacement page with a looping video and an announcement that the site had been hacked was the only consequence.^[4]

On August 15, 2013, All is Brawl came under a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack). Other sections from the "All is" network were affected as well. The following day, Smashboards suffered an intrusive attack that led to a reset that lost the forum roughly 10 hours of data. On August 25, Smashboards went down, initially reporting that it was experiencing server issues^[5] and later confirmed that the site was also under a sustained DDoS attack^[6]. It is unknown if the Smashboards intrusion on August 15 is related to its DDoS attack on August 25. On August 27, the Project M website became the third site to go down as a result of a DDoS attack. For unknown reasons SSBWiki was spared throughout the ordeal.

All three sites remained mostly unresponsive until August 28, when Smashboards briefly went back up before trying the CloudFlare anti-DDoS service. AlphaZealot reported that owners from each site were working together to find a solution. ^[7] Project M webmaster Warchamp7 later told video game blog site Kotaku that "the only viable solution to the problem at this moment is expensive and not something we can easily pursue," but added there were plans to mitigate the attacks if they continued^[8].

By September 2013, all three sites were functional again, though while Smashboards and the Project M website came out relatively unscathed, the DDoS attack dealt significant damage to AiB's aging website that was already in notoriously poor condition, playing a part in accelerating the site's ongoing decline and eventual shutdown. The perpetrator behind the DDoS attack remains unknown to this day, though it's believed to have been someone with a vendetta against the competitive Smash community, given the targeting of the two primary competitive Smash hubs at the time and the website for the mod created with a heavily competitive-centric focus.

Sexual Misconduct Allegations

Throughout 2020, numerous victims came forward and accused not only several notable community members of abusing their power to prey on those that could not stand up for themselves, particularly women and children, but also the community as a whole for working in a way that enables and protects said abusers, actively making it difficult for victims to speak up through peer pressure.

Many abusers have since been banned and ousted from the community and its events. When it became clear that these behaviors were happening for a long time, many questioned who else in the community knew these incidents were happening and for how long, creating a sense of distrust and skepticism among community members.

While these allegations are still ongoing, there have been steps to prevent situations like this from happening again. Several tournaments are attempting to restructure their brackets to make sure potential victims are not exposed to potential threats. A committee was created to oversee these changes, but they were quickly disbanded as they proved ineffective in actually enforcing what they set out to do. Most importantly, the door has been opened for more open communication within the community and proper procedure should another incident occur.

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1. ^  The Kitty Corp Meow Mix Forums
2. ^  Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evolution 2007
3. ^  Update: Smash is Back!! Changes to the Evo 2013 Schedule
4. ^  Smashboards was hacked
5. ^  Smashboards' Facebook announcement on server issues
6. ^  Smashboards' Facebook announcement acknowledging a DDoS attack
7. ^  The Great Smash DDoS of 2013 by AlphaZealot on Reddit
8. ^  Top Smash Bros. Fan Sites Knocked Offline, Hackers Blamed on Kotaku, 28 August 2013