2024 was the year of hate. Starting with the world’s biggest pop culture feud to the far higher stakes example in an unfortunate political climate within America, the haters collectively took home numerous victories over the last year. Now, what does this have to do with Melee? Well, 2024 began with initial promise for Melee, but ended on a bit of a whimper over the last couple of months. For myself, I can’t help but feel a little bitter about how this year’s gone for the community.
At the same time though, for every disappointing setback I’ve noticed, I’ve also seen as many cool developments within the scene. Instead of talking about last year through the lens of hate – or just lying and talking purely about the beauty of Smash or whatever – I’m going to offer a sober recap of what stands out to me for Melee news from 2024. Not all of what I’m about to talk about are necessarily positive. They’re not necessarily negative either. In fact, some of you might even question the news value of mentioning them. That’s okay though. I’m just sharing what stood out to me, and what I’m curious about for Melee moving forward.
New Leadership
Since the collapses (or diminished capacities) of Beyond the Summit, Panda Global, VGBC, Golden Guardians, and even The Big House going on hiatus, we have seen the rise of new community leadership. While this has been ongoing since 2023, it’s developed in further ways over the last twelve months specifically.
In my opinion, the most notable example is Galint Gaming. Ran by Dhir, the head TO behind Battle of BC, Galint’s been practically at every other big event and involved in some way – I’d consider it probably the most notable of the new age stream/event production teams. Not too far away on the West Coast, there’s Level1 TV. This is the team behind several esports events in the Pacific Northwest, most notably Don’t Park on the Grass. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Eggdog Esports either, the group behind the Eggdog Invitational. We then get into what I’d broadly consider the “East Coast” group of power players. Two teams stand out on a national level: Nouns, the team behind the Nounsvitational, and Luminosity, who still remains more committed to the Panda playbook of treating Ultimate as its money-maker, but, to their credit, ran a sequel to its Miami series that became a major. Speaking of which, by the way, 2024 had another first-time major in Wavelength 2024.
Beyond Melee’s new wave of major leadership, it’s worth noting the growing independence of Melee’s regional scenes. The rise of Aiden Calvin’s Star League clearly worked as a success for SoCal Melee, and to start 2025, New England Melee has already announced its own variant of the same format. Some of the most interesting groups in Melee, in my opinion, are the regional ones. For long-standing giants, you have Even Matchup Gaming (which is obviously involved at a major level too with GOML) and NYCMelee still around. However, for organizations that grew in prominence over 2024, two groups come to mind: EURank, the team behind Europe’s Top 100 rankings, and Washington Melee, which represents one of the most active state scenes in America. Actually – three: Very Local Melee, the team behind Verdugo and Deyve’s monthly series.
I mentioned a lot of groups here, and that’s just scratching the surface of organizations and people, many of whom I haven’t even brought up yet. But zooming out a bit, I can’t help but wonder if the community has reached a point of being so decentralized that it’s just not worth the pain in the ass to ever consolidate its resources in any meaningful way. To speak from personal experience, usually what happens in this type of community environment is the following pattern: someone tries to consolidate or standardize something in the scene, everyone is on board, and then the moment that people are asked to sacrifice something for the greater good, they refuse.
Then, one or two things happen: the party offering something then pressures the people reluctant to go on board by force, or they continue arguing forever and the community loses something that could have been potentially awesome. This is the reality of trying to do cool things in the community: you run into other people who have a different idea of what doing a cool thing means, and inevitably, there’s going to be conflict. Obviously, nobody has any real power over each other, and everyone is choosing to be involved, but it still can be unpleasant, especially when there’s no real incentive against people being vindictive. Look at how contentious player bans can be: the moment an event is not mentioned on an obscure blog, the most random people suddenly start calling for your head to be chopped off. Brain worms, dude.
I don’t know. It’s ultimately a great thing that Melee has so many people that want to get involved and are willing to contribute to the game. In all honesty, it’s cynical of me to see the current environment of Melee and immediately think about what could go wrong – and to be vulnerable, maybe I’m projecting a little bit. Maybe it could all go right, and perhaps where the scene is at isn’t so bad after all. It’s just what comes to mind for me as the flipside of what’s otherwise an interesting series of changes.
Melee’s Influencer Era
Melee’s now reached a point where in order to be involved in any large-scale capacity, you have to learn how to navigate spaces with large personalities. To an extent, this has always been true, but it certainly feels different today, when some of our largest events outright pay top players to use their stream channels for their events – or, bare minimum, work a behind-the-scenes deal with them. Full disclosure: this is something I’ve actively suggested before in this column, and I don’t think it’s entirely without merit. For example, and to my knowledge, when Tipped Off was broadcasted on Mang0’s channel, Mang0 gave the event one hundred percent of the advertising revenue, and that’s great.
However, without casting judgment on the players, I do worry about what this means for Melee’s long term ecosystem. As I’ve written about before, there’s four general groups of involvement in the scene: fans, ‘promoters’ (the content creators), events, and players. A healthy ecosystem involves these four groups working in tandem with one another, but top players – as in people like Mang0, Hungrybox, moky, Zain, and Cody Schwab – happen to be the scene’s most notable promoters. As such, they hold immense leverage over major tournaments and, in my opinion, basically everyone in the scene who wants to make a large-scale contribution. I won’t mince words here: the conflicting interests that come and need to be managed as a result of this dynamic are incredibly frustrating to manage. It’s never fun when politics gets in the way of doing things you want to do.
To be fair, I don’t blame people for recognizing the benefits that come with making deals with the devil (I say this, with mostly love). Obviously, there’s not some top player-led conspiracy to ruin events for everyone else and run away with boatloads of cash from Melee, or to control the community. I don’t really have a solution here either. We’re not going to get anywhere by yelling at streamers to be worse at their literal job.
| 2016 Most Streamed Melee Channels (Twitch) | 2024 Most Streamed Melee Channels (Twitch) |
| VGBC | mang0 |
| Beyond the Summit | genesisgg |
| Showdown Smash | VGBC |
| mang0 | GalintGaming |
| Evo | Hungrybox |
| SWSX GamingEsports | slimeIRL |
| EvenMatchupGaming | ZainNaghmi |
| Team OXY | btssmash |
| GeekyGoonSquad | CodySchwab |
| DreamHackSmash | bobbybigballz19 |
In my opinion though, people could learn from the approach that many regional tournament organizers have taken to this dynamic – and that approach is not giving a single fuck. In my time with talking to deeply involved friends here, the key here is to prioritize the experiential element of it: make your event (or contribution to the scene) so sick that everyone wants in on it, and don’t overthink it. Instead of trying to gain as many viewers as possible or scoring homie points with those with the biggest platforms, these people make attending their tournaments as amazing as possible. I don’t judge anyone for trying to capitalize on the current influencer-driven climate in Melee, and there is value in having that ‘represented’ somewhere in the scene. However, it’s something I’ve thought about a decent amount, and I continue to hold some reservations about it.
The Broken Promise of High Major Attendance
Earlier in 2024, I wrote a big column about how Melee major attendance could shape up for the rest of the year. The long story short is that all the information I had on upcoming events, as well as the attendance numbers for the first half of the year, seemed to indicate that 2024 could be one of Melee’s most successful attendance years in recent memory. I had every reason to be hopeful, and ever since I wrote this column, this has been a talking point among multiple commentators and Melee pundits. Well, I’m here to update you that the promise of Melee’s renaissance did not happen. It flopped.
In all fairness, I don’t think I was necessarily wrong for being hopeful for majors. But it was probably bullish of me to assume that The Big House’s projected attendance would transfer in a significantly additive way to several other tournaments. The truth was that this really hurt attendance in the second half of the year. Don’t Park on the Grass limited its attendance deliberately before the raising the cap and ending up with just under 900 Melee entrants (admittedly due to surges in entrants for other games forcing the event’s hand). Let’s Make Moves Miami didn’t even crack 200 Melee entrants. Wavelength hit about half of Shine’s attendance in the previous year: not necessarily its own fault as a new series, but still relatively low.
It wasn’t entirely bad. Each of Genesis, Tipped Off, Riptide, GOML, and Supernova saw increases in attendance. However, Collision 2024 tied its 2023 iteration, and BoBC under-performed from 2023. I would also mention that the relative lack of open majors in the back end of the year was not for a lack of effort. Each of Platfight 2024, Pataka Esports Festival, The Function 4, and SAPF had potential to be majors, but ended up not reaching that status due to top player disinterest or burnout (though Platfight came close). Now, none of this means that Melee is necessarily dying. If I looked at the regional and local levels, it’s possible that attendance trends are positive or mostly in the same direction as before. But that’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s continue the doom and gloom.
The Continued Decline of Twitch Viewership
As a continuation from 2023, Melee had its worst year of Twitch viewership in recorded history. I’m not necessarily trying to get you, the reader, to panic – I just mentioned the importance of doing things that are cool because they’re cool instead of doing things to gain eyes. At the same time though, this is something that’s worth being pretty real about.
I think there’s a bigger story behind declining viewership that’s more concerning beyond the whole “number goes down” element (the reasons and contributing factors being outside the scope of this column). What isn’t captured by the above chart is the relatively loose house of cards that currently holds up stream production in the first place. In addition to being largely underpaid work (due to limited major budgets) there’s a shortage of supply for people with equipment, skills, and domain knowledge needed to run major tournament streams. The moment these people finally burn out, organizers are going to be in a whole new world of trouble.
The Platform Fighter Community
Over the last year, we’ve seen the growth of the PFC (is that the official title now? Let’s run with it), as well as Melee’s place within it. Along with the creation of an entire event dedicated to platform fighters, Rivals of Aether 2 ended up being published by Offbrand Studios and, by all means, seems to be quite successful. Although Riot ended up not continuing in its development of a platform fighter, this was still a notable year for the subgenre of sorts, especially given the announcement of Fizzi’s involvement (as well as the founder of start.gg’s involvement) in the development of a new “Melee-like” game. In fact, just recently, longtime Melee great Fiction waxed poetic about Nickelodeon All Stars Brawl 2: a series I literally forgot existed until he brought it up.
How does Melee stand to benefit from the rise of the ‘platform fighter’ its existence has inspired? Is the future of Melee tournaments to use such platform fighters as a Trojan horse of sorts to protect their events and find a better monetization model? Will LACS Rivals 2 happen in 2025? With large community crossover between these games, the growing prominence of this sub-genre was certainly something to note over the last year.
Melee’s New Mount Rushmore
From 2020 to the end of 2024, we’ve had an unofficial Big Three in the Melee pantheon: Mang0, Armada, and Hungrybox. Most people in the scene typically agree that one of these three is the greatest player of all-time. If you value modernity and the sheer volume of a resume, Hungrybox is your main. If you care about head-to-heads and consistency, you can’t go wrong with Armada. If you want the player that’s been at the top longer than anyone else and has the most large-scale victories ever, Mang0’s your guy. A lot of people are going to nitpick the specific way I’ve summarized this debate, but this is, very broadly speaking, what you need to know about Melee’s three GOATs.
That, of course, brings us to Zain, whom I don’t think has quite entered GOAT contention yet, but certainly seems much closer than he was in 2023. With seventeen major wins, he’s just underneath Armada (22), Mang0 (33), and Hungrybox (37) as the fourth biggest raw major champion in Melee history. He’s basically guaranteed to have a second No. 1 annual finish on SSBMRank, which would make him part of this same group of players for the modern era to ever finish at the top spot multiple times. It gets crazier when you consider that if a RetroSSBMRank were made for the Netplay era, Zain’s legacy would be that much better. He would have a third year in which he was widely recognized as the best player (though, importantly, with an asterisk). That would tie him with Ken for most number of times at No. 1 on such a list. In that same period of time, Zain won nine online majors, which aren’t even counted above.
Clearly, there’s an asterisk to these achievements. This was basically a different game, and the alternate formats of events like Summit Champions League obviously don’t translate one to one with major wins either. At the same time though, it did happen, and it seems like a plus to Zain’s legacy. It’s just a question of how much it matters. To me, I don’t believe it gives Zain an argument above Armada or Hungrybox in an all-time ranking, but Zain’s done enough to separate himself from Ken. If that’s true, then he’s established himself as the clear fourth greatest player ever.
Other All-Time Legacy Changers
In addition to Zain’s legacy taking a notable step forward from 2024, Cody Schwab also added to his major resume with multiple large victories. As of right now, he has eleven major wins, putting him just under Leffen (13), Ken (16), and everyone else I mentioned in the above section. It might sound sacrilegious to some of my readers from the Five Gods era, but there’s no longer a good argument for any of Mew2King or PPMD above Cody. Given his interest in Rivals and plan to separate himself from Melee obligations in the short-term, I’m not sure Cody will do much more in 2025, but I wouldn’t totally discount the possibility of him passing Leffen this year.
On another note, you have moky winning his first major ever at DPG, with him joining only 22 other people. There’s also Jmook breaking his major slump to win the Nounsvitational to win his third major of all-time, tying him with aMSa for 11st most of all-time. Both are basically guaranteed to finish in the Top 5 of 2025 SSBMRank, barring something extremely bizarre, giving each of them their second year ranked in that position. Though I wouldn’t put either of them in the Plup or PC Chris or Azen territory for potential Top 10 all-time players, they’re now knocking on the door.
Things get pretty interesting underneath that. We’ll get to some of the more shocking surprises in the next segments, but for people who haven’t won majors yet, Aklo stands out as the next person up. He’s one of only 18 people to ever finish top two at a major three times or more, and every single one of the other ones who did it ended up winning in the future. Meanwhile, players like Soonsay, Joshman, Spark, Trif, Salt, KoDoRiN, and Krudo effectively cemented themselves as the equivalent of Hall of Fame players. Throughout 2024, they either had big wins over the best of the best, regional dominance, or deep runs at large tournaments. To a lesser, but still notable degree, the same could be said for Magi, Ben, Medz, Fiction, Ossify, and Chem, as well as Preeminent, Skerzo, and even a longtime great like Drephen. Yes, that Drephen. He recently achieved his highest anking of the SSBMRank era last summer; that’s definitely a boost to his legacy.
You’ve probably noticed a bunch of people missing here. Don’t worry though. I’m intentionally saving them for later. For now, and to close this segment, I want to talk about one of the craziest storylines of 2024 – it’s so wild that it warrants its own section.
The Rise of SDJ
After they had already made their first major top eight in 2023, SDJ went on an absolute rampage in 2024. Along with defeating Wizzrobe and aMSa, SDJ had exceptional showings at DPG, Riptide, and GOML, which involved the best set of 2024 in a heart-breaker Jigglypuff ditto against Hungrybox. It’s not as if they’ve been under the radar – it’s that they’ve genuinely become a landmark representative for their character, not merely in terms of modern Melee, but on a deeper level as an all-time great.
There’s just not many players after Hungrybox and Mang0 that have reached this level of prominence with Jigglypuff. Four years ago, in the official Top 100 Melee Players of All-Time, the other mains of this character were Darc, Prince Abu, and The King. Since then, we’ve seen amazing performances from 2saint, Khalid, and SDJ, but in reality, SDJ is on their own island in terms of consistent top-level achievements. They have four major top eights and will likely finish in the Top 20 for 2024. Darc is the only other Jigglypuff of the last twenty years that’s shown this type of success, and even he has fewer major top eights (three) than SDJ in an era where he never achieved the same highs as SDJ. As a matter of fact, SDJ has more major top eights than each of Prince Abu (one) and The King (two) combined. There’s no argument for them above SDJ as competitors.
What SDJ’s done with their character is nothing short of groundbreaking. If they played anyone else, or if people just saw a list of SDJ’s results and didn’t recognize who it represented, I’m convinced that the community would view that resume as representing someone on the outskirts of major contention. It gets even crazier when you consider that the current environment of top level Melee – one with so many rising star Fox players, many of whom even SDJ has struggled against – has created several obstacles for SDJ’s long-term prospects. And yet instead of crumbling, retiring, or even declining in performances, they’ve built themself a nice little legacy as one of the greatest Jigglypuff players of all-time. I would not be surprised if, by the end of 2025, SDJ gets to winners finals at a major; it’s a lot closer to reality than you’d think.
The Mid and Low Tier Renaissance
If you didn’t live under a rock for 2024, this is probably what you imagine as the year’s biggest storyline. And how could it not be? I won’t waste too much time going over every single part of Melee’s wacky metagame development over the last year, but I have to give the unexpected twists and turns of quite a bit of coverage.
First off, there’s the headliner results of Donkey Kong: Junebug getting third place at Supernova, winning a regional over Salt, and making yet another top eight at Eggdog Invitational, while also nabbing sets over moky and Mang0 (for whatever little that’s worth). Amazingly, he didn’t even have the craziest result of a DK player – that would be the biggest Melee upset of all-time in BING, 64 seed of GOML, defeating the reigning world champion Cody Schwab. BING would go on to stun aMSa in similar fashion at the Nounsvitational, as well as showcase regional dominance himself when traveling to Ontario. Combined with Akir’s win over Soonsay at Genesis X, as well as Quang’s wins over Ossify, moky, and Spark, Donkey Kongs stole the spotlight in 2024.
That’s just scratching the surface too. With Morsecode762 defeating Cody and Jmook, Plup’s Samus having a deep run of its own at Supernova (beating Jmook), as well as the rise of Wevans – who seems like a favorite for Top 50 this year with strong results – Samus has seen a quiet return to prominence as well. I haven’t even brought up the fact that Aklo used Link to defeat the best player in the world (twice), nor have I fully talked about each of MOF and Nicki’s brilliant performances, with Nicki having arguably a top five underdog run in modern history at DPG and a chance to finish 2024 in the Top 10. If it happens, Nicki would join SluG and Wobbles as the only Ice Climbers players to finish in that range in SSBMRank history.
Am I done yet? Nope. Longtime New Hampshire Mr. Game & Watch legend glock in my toyota made the Top 100 ballot with a 33rd place at Supernova 2024, as well as a big regional victory over the rest of New England. Walmart Shoes, BINGHI, and Mooshies terrorized regionals at a more obscure level as well. For goodness’ sake, Loadspiller made top 64 at Tipped Off with freaking Bowser. This was the year of wacky Melee – and yet it’s not my pick for being the biggest storyline of 2024.
Women in Melee
Many of you might roll your eyes at the title of this section. It’s definitely a little cringe-inducing to write it myself. I even understand the impulse to see this segment as me trying to gain brownie points. But at the risk of sounding like a cringe male ally or whatever, this is a development that’s really surprised me over the last year. Genuinely, there’s many notable women who contributed really great things to this community in 2024. We’ll start with the most obvious example of representation in SSBMRank itself. With Magi, Salt, Zamu and MOF, we have four Top 50 women players. After that, there’s Zanya, Nanami, Kacey, bonfire10, and essy on the current ballot. If these nine make the list, 2024 would have the most number of women on the Top 100 ever – the quietest, but also coolest Melee storyline of 2024.
I know it doesn’t sound like much. To this day, our gender disparity is still a huge L that Melee has to hold. But it is nice to see it improve and have it represented in this way. For reference, last year had only five women in the Top 100. Mind you, this doesn’t count other competitive contributions. One of the coolest – and, frankly, rare examples of compelling – storylines in doubles has been the rise of the French sisters, i4 and Fecfec, with i4 herself taking home a huge singles tournament victory over Jah Ridin’ and a bunch of top European talent at The 2nd Gallery. Meanwhile, Goodie, the current number one in Australia, didn’t make the ballot for 2024, but was quite active and prominent throughout the year. I feel similarly about people like Ember, fitzy, McCloud, and longtime Melee coach Ditzy, among many others.
That’s not even getting into the multiple ways that women contribute to our scene. It could be organizing tournaments, like how New England’s Julzz helped organize Wavelength, or the way that Coin has excelled in running the BODIED series. It could be running the Community Safety Resource Project – one of the most thankless and yet well-needed contributions to the scene – which Emrae started. It could be commentating, the way that each of Sp1nda and Kadence have done at the regional and major level this year.
To go down the entire list of notable women in the scene would take up way too much time. And in a way, I know that this segment feels very Feminism 101, as I’ve already named many women outright. Honestly though, you can think whatever you want of me bringing it up. I sincerely believe the increased visibility of and contributions of women has been a way more meaningful thing to the actual health of the community over the last year. At a time in which it’s very easy to be cynical (as you’ve seen from my writing above), this is one thing that’s been an unambiguous good. To me, it seems far more important to bring it up than talking about how cool it is that another wacky character had a good result or whatever nonsense. I hope to see the increased visibility of prominent women in Melee continue for 2025.