On the morning of March 25, longtime former professional “Super Smash Bros. Melee” player Aziz “Hax” Al-Yami died in his sleep. According to sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, it was due to a severe medical emergency and long-term health complications that led to his hospitalization. He was 30 years old.
Having started playing Melee from a young age, Hax quickly became known for his technical prowess, meticulous play style, and numerous major top eight performances throughout the Brawl era. In 2013, he finished at No. 6 on the first official Top 100, and he was widely considered the best Captain Falcon player in the world. Hax would then shock several of his peers by switching to Fox and continuing to place in the Top 10 of SSBMRank multiple times for the rest of the 2010s, taking sets over Mang0, Hungrybox, Mew2King, Leffen, and Plup. In late 2021, Hax was ranked the 19th greatest Melee player of all-time.
Beyond his achievements as a competitor, Hax was widely recognized for his larger-than-life personality and passion for the game. He had a penchant for strong, nearly immovable opinions and making comedy out of it, such as when he debuted a fake controller for Captain Falcon players that primarily had the left trigger, right trigger, A button, and start button. Hax also came up with the term “20XX,” both a reference to the “Megaman” series and his belief that the future of Melee involved everyone playing Fox, widely considered the best character in the game.
Hax struggled with hand injuries throughout his career and took extended breaks from competition. Following a doctor telling him his Melee career was over, he launched 20XX, his own company for manufacturing and distributing digital rectangle controllers (B0XX controllers). Wielding the B0XX himself, Hax effectively re-learned the game from scratch, clawing his way back into the top echelon during the latter part of the 2010s. In the process, Hax became a large source of inspiration for others in the community and a vocal advocate for digital controllers. He was especially beloved within New York City and the broader Tristate region, from the time he entered the scene to well after Smash’s 2013 revival period. In 2019, he launched his own local, negotiating a contract with a venue, calling the series “Hax’s Nightclub.” By the end of the 2010s, he was one of the most iconic figures in the entire community.
A Polarizing Figure
Hax’s unfiltered approach to sharing his opinions practically garnered an equal number of supporters and detractors. He often pushed for radical changes to the Melee rule set, such as a ledge grab limit and decreasing the timer, with the former eventually becoming the scene’s standard. Following the widespread implementation of UCF, an in-game modification made to fix issues inherent to how Melee interprets controller inputs, Hax argued that this was insufficient and later on promoted his own series of modifications in a package called “Melee 1.03,” which never became standardized in the broader community.
When Hax made the B0XX controller, it came after an ugly fallout between himself and SmashBox, a company he previously worked with to create a digital controller for Melee. This was far from Hax’s only public battle with another controller manufacturer; in 2020, Hax would become the target of a lawsuit from Greg Turbo, an ex-partner of Hax and the leader of Frame1, a competing digital controller manufacturer, who claimed that Hax violated a non-disparagement clause upon his departure from 20XX. After a lengthy legal battle and the deposition becoming public, the two eventually settled their dispute out of court.
As the first person to make Top 100 playing strictly on a digital rectangle controller, Hax’s return to prominence catalyzed community-wide discussions on fairness and accessibility. With digital controllers seeing increasing use throughout the community, one of the trend’s most vocal critics was Leffen, a long-time rival of Hax who had concerns about the advantages offered by them. The two overwhelmingly did not get along for most of their time competing together, with frequently ugly spats and this topic being one of many that led to the ultimate boiling point of their feud.
Evidence.Zip 2
In June 2021, and after several years of personal animosity between the two players, Hax released “evidence.zip 2,” the first of a series of videos calling for Leffen’s permanent ban from the Smash community, named after the first “evidence.zip” that led to Leffen’s previous temporary ban in 2013. Among other spurious claims, Hax compared Leffen to Adolf Hitler, claimed that Leffen was a dark triad psychopath taking over the scene, and said that Leffen used Smash’s #MeToo movement to deliberately spread false information about other players and gain clout. This video, though largely panned, nonetheless incited droves of harassment toward Leffen and any related parties that spoke out against Hax.
Upon his indefinite ban from multiple Smash tournaments, and ignoring several requests from both friends and major organizers, Hax continued to release follow-up videos, largely repeating many of his claims, though removing the most egregious comparisons, before finally apologizing months later. A year later, amid his indefinite ban, Hax stated that the creation of these videos was part of an extended period of psychosis he suffered due to personal trauma and alcohol abuse. Following a scene-wide indefinite ban period, tourney organizers from New York City, allowed Hax to return for a probation period at the start of 2023. In exchange for partial re-integration into the scene, he agreed to not publicly discuss or contest his ban status, and he also agreed to hand his local tournament series over to the community.
The Second Ban
Hax broke the terms of his agreement multiple times, either discussing his ban with friends or talking about it on his Twitch stream, further cultivating a toxic online environment surrounding himself, Leffen, and tournament organizers. According to most major tournament organizers I talked to, his attendance was not an active threat to other smashers, but there was widespread uncertainty about him continuously breaking the agreement he made with his local scene.
Including major tournament heads who initially said they were ready to unban him, they universally shared a growing fear about the cult of personality he was building around himself. They also had concerns about the impact of any coordinated pushback both on themselves as potential subjects of harassment and on Hax’s deteriorating mental state. By February 2024, following Hax once again publicly appealing his ban, several major, regional, and local tournament organizers released a statement permanently banning Hax from their events, including his own region in New York City. Though he continued to compete at the few events which didn’t ban him, play thousands of sets on Slippi’s Ranked mode, and temporarily finish No. 1 on the Ranked ladder, Hax’s competitive career was effectively over.
Personal Reflections
While Hax and I were not quite close friends, we were in fairly frequent contact for about eighteen months. In early 2019, at a Connecticut tournament, I sat down to play with him and assumed he didn’t know me. Over the next thirty minutes or so, I quietly appreciated the rare experience of getting pulverized by a Top 50 player. When we were done, he told me, “good games man; you can write a Monday Morning Marth about that session.” To this day, it’s a little strange that a professional player would recognize my face based on the fact that I wrote articles about Melee. However, as I’ve learned in my experiences in the scene, the seemingly superficial ways in which we contribute to the community tend to give people strong first impressions, for better or worse.
Our discussions were overwhelmingly online and almost always about Melee. Though I wasn’t initially sure why Hax was interested in talking to me in particular, we both loved Melee in different ways. For me, it was discussing history, telling stories about people, and speculating on how players could perform at future tournaments. For Hax, it was about researching the percentages when different Fox moves broke tumble, talking about players he wanted to beat, and his broader community vision. When my book came out, he privately told me he and his family members loved it.
Every now and then, I’d get the sense that Hax was only talking to me because he thought I was useful to him. But I didn’t care. If it was true, I wasn’t much better. I talked to him because I thought it was fun to discuss Melee with a colorful source of information. I was fine with what seemed like a fairly transactional, yet mildly positive relationship. That’s not to say that we didn’t share a few common interests outside of the game; for example, we were both from immigrant parents and we both loved “Final Fantasy X.” But these topics always led back to Melee in some form or another.
Throughout our conversations, Hax gave me the impression that he was quite aware about different factions within the scene, and that he viewed it like a terrain with territories that occasionally overlapped or created conflict. He’d speak in candid ways about where everyone fit, how to operate around them accordingly, and would crack off-color jokes about how “random nobodies” could suddenly have sway in the community—usually out of frustration that someone didn’t agree with him on Twitter or Reddit. Unsurprisingly, Hax was extremely stubborn. He’d never say it to me directly, but if you didn’t agree with him, you were either someone he had to get on board or push out of the way.
Although our interactions remained polite, I would sometimes press him about the way he talked to and about others. I’d directly ask him why he was acting incredibly unfairly to people who didn’t deserve it and merely dissented from his opinion. Hax’s typical response was to break the tension with a joke and then offer a half-legitimate, half-nonsensical explanation for why a seemingly harmless disagreement could jeopardize the future of Melee if it was not challenged in the most extreme way possible. While frustrating, I would be lying if I said I did not find it slightly endearing. At the time, his impeccable sense for comedic timing seemed to almost override any real qualms I could have about him willing to be an asshole.
I’ve been thinking a lot about our messages this last week. It’s not because they’re anything particularly special; it’s just odd that we talked so much despite me never feeling like I knew him as anything other than Hax from Melee. Since I deleted Twitter, I can’t read our message history there, and due to Hax deactivating his old Facebook account, the vast majority of our discussions there are forever lost there too. However, when I looked at our most recent Discord chat, the last message from him involved congratulating me on my wedding. Funnily enough, it was because I told him that I was too busy getting married to help him edit a video script. How bizarre. In a relationship almost entirely about Melee, our last Discord chat was about something incredibly personal.
We stopped talking around the early part of the pandemic. It wasn’t for any particular reason; it just happened. A year later, and during the period where Hax was releasing videos about Leffen, I considered reaching out. However, it was not quite my place to try helping someone whom I wasn’t actually that close to. The way I saw it, he was banned, eventually the situation would resolve itself, and I had no obligation to him. The part of me that enjoyed our conversations was basically gone anyway. In fact, I actually started to hate how Hax was hurting the community and multiple friends. Unlike before, they weren’t just told off in a stray argument; they were subjects of consistent harassment in the public square. It reminded me of his darker side; not that I was directly subject to it or anything, but that I had previously glossed over his unpleasant tendencies because I saw him as ultimately harmless. Clearly, he wasn’t harmless any more.
Without diminishing the real and sudden escalation that occurred as a result of the videos, I have to confess that I found the entire saga strangely in character for Hax. We shouldn’t forget that there is a segment in the original “evidence.zip 2” where he compares Leffen tweeting on his phone to Light Yagami holding the Death Note. In the full context, it’s horrible, but by itself, this type of comparison was not necessarily an unfamiliar level of hyperbolic tenor—like a worse version of when he once said that Hungrybox winning majors put Melee in the “666XX” timeline. Between the commitment to position his opinion in unhinged terms and the discordant attempts at humor in an otherwise blatantly awful situation, it felt like something only Hax could feel wild confidence in putting out into the world. It should have never happened, but it did because he thought it was the right thing to do. And whenever Hax believed something was the right thing to do, he was going to do it.
Last summer, well after the whole situation had spiraled into something legitimately frightening, Hax reached out to me for the first time in years. He privately asked if I believed his career was over. I told him it was; that the best thing he could do is to live his best life out of Melee. He then said, “what I did was so illogical. [It] actually doesn’t make sense why I did that.” Later on, he asked that I urgently talk to him later in the day. I knew exactly where this was going, as his desperation had publicly escalated around that time. To my understanding, it included repeated, unwanted contact with community members and anyone surrounding them.
I told him that I wasn’t around, and that he needed to get his life together outside of Melee; that it would take a long time and an extraordinary event for me to ever advocate for him or believe he could have a healthy relationship with the game. Afterward, I apologized for not giving him what he wanted and said that we couldn’t talk any more. Nine months later, when I learned that Hax died, I felt my stomach drop before experiencing immediate disbelief. Surely, it would come out that he was secretly alive the whole time, or that he’d miraculously recover right in time to appeal his permanent ban for the 99th time; it’s almost comforting to picture him posting a photo of himself with the caption “hit the hax$ pixel”—we’d collectively breathe a sigh of relief and groan at the idea of incorporating a Melee reference into a life-or-death situation.
I’m instead thinking about our final conversation. I’ve thought about it every day since his death. It was the last time we spoke. I wish it wasn’t.
Closing Words
When people die, there’s a tendency to think of them in binary terms. Those who do good things are remembered as good, while people who do bad things are remembered as bad. With public figures, these feelings become especially divisive, as they don’t only apply to the person who died; they apply to everyone around them. In the Melee community—a scene that feels like everyone’s in the same classroom, somehow both relatable and famous—that tension has become harder to navigate.
Can you mourn someone whom you never really knew? Is there a proper way to emotionally process the absence of a person who once seemed like he was everywhere? There’s no easy answer, and unfortunately, it’s become harder for the community to publicly grieve. The hostility demonstrated toward others in the scene this past week–both from understandably angry friends and rabid supporters—further underscores the fragility of our current moment. But we should not be silent, nor should we fear backlash. We need to acknowledge the undeniably massive, yet complex effect he had on our community, and we should accept the void that’s appeared in the wake of his death. Superficial or not, the memories we have of him are all that’s left. Maybe you have a different set of memories, and that’s okay.
Hax was a magnetic force of nature whose infectious passion could both captivate peers and burn everything around him. He had other talents, like technical writing and playing other games at a high level, but to him, Melee was the only way he believed he could make a difference—the only way he wanted to make a difference. I’ll always remember Hax for the immense impact he had on others, for his countless contributions to Melee culture, and for his total devotion to the game. His life is a testament to a desire that Wife once perfectly expressed: a chance to be somebody. We won’t see anyone like Hax ever again and we will never forget him. Rest in peace, Hax.