With The Function 4 coming up, it’s really tempting to spend my time previewing this upcoming regional. It feels like one of the most exciting regionals of the year. Not only is Zain in attendance (though he’s playing Roy) – you have basically every generation of Tristate talent in attendance, whether it’s up-and-comers like Fro116 or ghosts of the past like Swedish Delight and Rishi. By all means, it’s shaping up to be an incredible event.
WE GOT THE PRE-FUNCTION NIGHTCLUB LOCAL THIS WEEK!
I have a feeling this is going to be a stacked Nightclub so sign up quick! Get your last minute Function practice in against NYC's best 🙂
See y'all there!https://t.co/xTrl8vAPXE
— NYCMelee (@nycmelee) October 20, 2024
Before I learned Zain was playing Roy, part of what made me interested in the event was that the world’s best player was initially attending as the heavy favorite. It made me think about the whole idea of players invading regions and successfully conquering them. Truth be told, there isn’t really much shame in having literal Zain come stomp around on your home court. If he somehow did it with Roy, it’d be crazy, yet still strangely believable with the right bracket path. But how about other players?
In today’s column, I am going to explore the concept of an Extinction Event. I’ll first explain just exactly what this is. After that, I’ll reveal some great examples of Extinction Events – past, present, and future.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Warning – this is a very stupid column. Consider it a slow news week.
What is an Extinction Event?
According to Wikipedia, which we obviously know is never wrong, extinction events can be referred to as a “mass extinction” or as a “biotic crisis.” To paraphrase, it’s essentially a catastrophic series of events that lead to a drastic decline in the population of living organisms. What you might imagine is something along the lines of an asteroid falling onto the Earth and wiping out a ton of the dinosaurs in the aftermath: something akin to the Alvarez hypothesis, although that’s up for debate in contemporary times.
In the much dumber context of Smash, we use the term Extinction Event to describe the shockingly catastrophic level of ass-whooping that someone may bring upon someone or something else. It can be a region, a specific tournament, a character – anything. The first recorded use of the term (roughly) can be seen below, within the Melee Stats Discord.
There’s an important nuance to be noted: the act of delivering a beatdown itself does not constitute an Extinction Event. When Jmook came to SoCal and immediately usurped Fiction as the overlord of Verdugo, nobody with functioning brain cells thought it was the Jmook-SoCal Extinction Event, because he would do that to practically every region. The key is that the harbinger of the Extinction Event has to disproportionately shake the confidence and perhaps even identity of whomever they bring forth a colossal L.
Now, it’s worth noting that the Muscoman Extinction Event played a big role in what made Fat Tino’s showdown against Muscoman at SoCal Star League fairly interesting. Thankfully for Europe, Fat Tino, someone who made the 2023 Top 100 ballot and is arguably No. 2 in the UK, clutched out a 3-2 victory. For what it’s worth though, Muscoman now lives in NorCal, is power-ranked there, and he recently defeated Umarth at Genesis: Black 2024. Ironically, he just brought the Muscoman Extinction Event to another region.
The NYC-S2J Extinction Event
When S2J came to New York City in late 2023, he had one of the best performances of his career, winning The Function 4. It was an especially amazing showing that followed up a bit of a slump he had during the summer. To win an event that Jmook finished in fifth place at was certainly not something to take for granted, and beating Aklo twice was just the cherry on top. He even received a crown and was called the King of New York. S2J would return in mid-2024 for Spit Your Game, an event that he entered as the number one seed. Even better, he even defeated Aklo in a first-to-five show match.
However, S2J immediately went on to lose to both Louis and K8A in the actual tournament. It is genuinely one of the most shocking regional results I’ve ever seen. With respect to Louis and K8A, two regional stars, S2J is a perennial Top 25 player. Louis isn’t nationally ranked (yet), and K8A barely made the list at No. 100 after the panel decided to exclude Leffen. Crazier yet is the fact that this clearly hasn’t been the typical performance for S2J this year, as he recently won Genesis Black 2024. Maybe it was just a bad day, but regardless, NYC technically got its revenge.
The DEEZ NUT-Tristate Extinction Event
In 2023 the two premier regions of the world came together to finally entangle in battle at Genesis: SoCal and Tristate. Although each side didn’t necessarily send in their best players – due to lack of interest from some of the player involved – they essentially negotiated a match which, to my understanding, was meant to represent different skill levels and create a mostly equal playing field. Keeping that in mind, what I am about to share here might be one of the most unexpected, funny, and epic turnarounds in a crew battle ever.
Eventually, Tristate sends in JJM on Final Destination to take on nut, a long-time SoCal Sheik. By every metric, it seems like a reasonable counterpick – right until nut destroyed him and went on to end the crew battle with having taken eight stocks. Later on in the same crew battle, another Sheik named deez would take an additional eight stocks. Think about that for a second. Imagine losing a crew battle because a dude called “deez” and another dude called “nut” destroyed some of your best players. Tristate literally got cleared by Deez Nut.
The Kage-NorCal Extinction Event
On a similar note for regional crew battles that took unexpected turns, I turn to The Big House 5 for NorCal taking on Canada. Now, I know I’ve picked on NorCal quite a bit in this column, but I swear that’s coincidental; NorCal is an incredible region. The scene has a ton of talent across different generations, amazing TOs, and a rich history of amazing community figures. Unfortunately for NorCal, I remembered this crew battle.
Ryan Ford two-stocks Laudandus, giving NorCal a huge lead. Shortly after, HomeMadeWaffles takes five stocks, with Mittens only taking three stocks. Following that is where Canada is seemingly doomed, with SFAT not only cleaning up Mittens, but two-stocking n0ne and taking another two from KirbyKaze. NorCal sends in dizzkidboogie, who only loses one stock, and Canada’s left to four Kage stocks against NorCal’s seven, with Shroomed sitting on the bench. Enter Kage. It just proves my belief that Ganondorf jumps up eight stocks on the tier list in a crew battle.
The Fourside Fights-SSBMRank Extinction Event
I watch Fourside Fights whenever it’s on, am a Patron of the show, and routinely talk about it in my column. I’ve also been on the show, although I would argue I’ve been robbed a couple of times. Anyway, it’s no surprise that I’m going to bring this up again, but in a whole different context. Which context, you ask? The rankings.
Look, it’s not a secret that the rankings take time and money to create. They are also very controversial. In this universe, the Fourside Fights show becomes too powerful, and eventually the rankings become too broke to independently function. Behind the scenes, we work a deal out and we replace the entire panel and selection process for the Top 100 in exchange for some of that sweet Fourside Cash. What replaces the rankings then? Basically whatever Jack wants. Maybe we even move on from treating Melee’s current singles format as the premier competitive standard to just talking about Melee on Fourside Fights, and our rankings become pundit rankings.
The Rivals of Aether 2-Melee Top Player Extinction Event
Rivals of Aether is one of the few platform fighters that continues to have an active, vibrant community that gives a shit about the game and not, say, making a few bucks off developer support. Judging by the positive reception its sequel seems to be receiving, it’s fair to say that this series is slowly growing out of its niche reputation and into the more public spotlight. I would consider the Rivals series a model example for what a successful platform fighter can look like in the post-Smash age.
You already know where this is heading. This is the actual extinction event to worry about – one in which Cody Schwab and several other top players finally decide that Melee sucks and that they want a change in their life. Maybe even the average community member decides that this piece of shit game has finally reached the point of no return. Or maybe it’s reached a different point to where we finally take the reverse engineered Melee with public domain fighters route.
The Walt Singularity-Melee Content Extinction Event
The Melee scene has tons of incredible content creators. I’ve shouted out wusstunes in this column before, but I think that Melee Moments is similarly fantastic. I love Fourside Fights, and there’s also Walt, who has maintained his content output while also commentating Melee top eights. He’s my friend, so I’m hardly objective when it comes to Walt, but it is pretty wild that he casually has a 100k-subscriber YouTube channel while being the most aggressively dedicated commentator in the scene.
This nicely transitions to a potential extinction event: what if Walt’s channel grows so big that he buys every Smash YouTube channel out? I’m talking about all those content creators I mentioned before and more. In this universe, they each write a different video about Donkey Kong, Link, or some stupid fucking low tier that the YouTube algorithm tells us to make videos about. Over time, the Melee community will slowly morph into the Walt community. All of us buy his merch. We will all get invested in Brawhalla. Some of us will play tag. He will commentate all of it. After enough time, we will dress up like Walt. We will talk like him. We will become Walt. We are now Walt. How’s it going, ladies and gentlemen? This is turndownforwalt.