One of the world's top Super Smash Bros. players recently knocked Nintendo for not sufficiently supporting the scene and said he hoped that Nintendo heard him. This week in Los Angeles, they did—after we played a clip of his speech to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.
Juan ”Hungrybox" Debiedma, a top-three-ranked Super Smash Bros. Melee pro, called Nintendo out a couple of weeks ago in his victory speech at Wisconsin tournament Smash ‘N' Splash 3: ”A certain company that acknowledges us but refuses to push us—I hope you're listening right now, because I want you to hear this," he said, as a room packed with players and fans cheered. ”I want you to hear the amount of people who support this league, the amount of people who want this to be a lifestyle for people. This is not just a video game. This is a lifestyle! All right?"
Listening to a recording of Debiedma's entreaty in a Los Angeles meeting room at E3 this week, Fils-Aime said: ”I love passionate Smash fans."
”I will say this," [Reggie] added. ”Five, six, seven years ago, as we engaged with our developers and talked to them about Smash Bros. and what was happening, there was not a lot of understanding about this space. And it's been people like [Nintendo of America's] Bill Trinen and JC Rodrigo and all of these folks who understand the space that have helped us educate our company and educate our developers around the benefits of engaging with the community and empowering and enabling this to happen.
”It was with the most recent Smash Bros. that we've done more tournaments and we're supporting both the Melee community as well as the Smash Bros. Wii U community and they're both vibrant and are continuing to grow."
Nintendo just doesn't want to do a league. Fils-Aime said as much to me when describing the company's philosophy about competitive gaming: ”It's community-oriented. It's enabling the community to drive it forward. We have relationships, obviously, with entities like Evo and Battlefly. We want to do this much more at a grassroots level than others' visions around leagues and big up-front payments and things of that nature."
Hungrybox had already seen Nintendo downplay the idea of making an official league, so he's not expecting it to happen, certainly not for Melee, which isn't even the Smash game that Nintendo seems most interested in promoting.
”I hope the best for the future and I respect Reggie and the Nintendo execs more than words can describe," he said. ”It just is always a dismay for our parent company to not see a venture in the same golden light we've been viewing it for over a decade."
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