Smash Bros Cast

Episode 3

Smash Bros Melee History

• Developer: HAL Laboratories

Development  

• Masahiro Sakurai was back in the driver seat for the sequel to Smash 64 and it would push him to a point that he referred to as destructive. It was the biggest project that he had ever led and because of that he took zero holiday’s off and had little to no weekends. He referred to Melee as “the sharpest game” in the series. With this game releasing so close to the launch of the GameCube the team really wanted to show the power of the system, so they worked with three different animation studios to complete the opening sequence.

• Mario

Reception

• Melee was the top-selling GameCube game at 7.09 million, it became the fastest selling GameCube title in Japan selling almost 360,000 copies in four days. Most critics and news outlets praised the game. Melee sits at 92/100 on Metacritic
  

• IGN 9.6/10

Competitive Melee

• The term I hear most often with Melee and the competitive scene is “happy accident.” Here’s this casual party game being played at a level I never thought was possible. The community discovered techniques like wavedashing, dashdancing, directional influence and L-canceling. Soon after small tournaments were being held in homes or game shops. Matt Deezie began hosting the Tournament Go series in Northern California and came up with a ruleset of legal stages and tournament procedures. More tournaments began to spring up and the community was growing. In 2004 Melee was added to MLG’s largest tournaments.

My History with Smash Melee

• Christmas morning 2001 my wife surprised me with a Gamecube and had all of our family members and friends buy me games and controllers. We very little money at that time, so I was very surprised. Smash was one of the three games I got that year and the moment I fired it up I was blown away by what I was seeing. I was still playing Perfect Dark and Mario Kart 64 at that time, so it was a massive improvement. The opening cinematic was magic. I unlocked all the characters and I love checking out the trophies, especially the proximity mine from Perfect Dark. Sadly Microsoft crushed those dreams. Unfortunately, I didn’t have many friends to play Melee with so after I unlocked all the characters it didn’t get nearly as much play time as I would have liked. In 2002 EGM posted that Sonic could be unlocked in Melee and I spent forever trying to KO