For several hours last weekend, one room in Curry Student Center was filled with some of the best “Super Smash Bros.” players in the New England region. While the competition was friendly, the players’ dedication was fierce, as they vied for pride and recognition in the Smash world.
On Feb. 1, the Northeastern Super Smash Bros. club hosted its fourth-ever semesterly regional tournament. The tournament drew over 140 college students to the second-floor suite of Curry Student Center, where participants competed in three games: “Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.,” or “SSB,” “Ultimate” and “Melee.”
The championship had two tournaments: one for “Ultimate” and one for “Melee.” Nintendo released the first version of the game — “Super Smash Bros.,” in 1999. “Melee” is the second installment, and “Ultimate” is the fifth and most recent installment, released in 2018.
The New England Collegiate Smash Bros. Championship, formerly known as the Massachusetts Battle of Top Academics, or MBTA, was founded in fall 2023 by Aiden Ih, a fourth-year computer science major and co-president of the Northeastern Super Smash Bros. club. This semester, 36 “Ultimate” and eight “Melee” teams competed, each made up of three players and one substitute.
“I really like college competition, so I wanted to host college tournaments,” Ih said. “Clearly, there’s a demand for it because everyone is really excited, and it’s grown every time we’ve run it.”
“Ultimate” games are played on a video game monitor, and “Melee” games are played on a CRT-based computer. The “Melee” tournament is run by Super Smash Bros. club co-president Ben Brown, a fourth-year chemical engineering major.
“‘Melee’ is an incredibly difficult game, and that is what turns a lot of people away. It’s hard work and it’s incredibly rewarding. There’s no better feeling than being rewarded for all the work you’ve put in,” Brown said. “The game was released in 2001, and there are still tens of thousands of people playing it across the world. There’s a reason for that — it’s magic.”
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth team played hard to win the “Melee” tournament. First place in the “Ultimate” tournament was taken home by the St. John’s University team from Queens, New York — led by fourth-year legal studies major Ethan Jameer.
“We really put our all into the sets we played,” Jameer said. “It’s really awesome to have known these people for the past three or four years and to travel with them and compete with them. And then, after so long, get a giant victory right when we are all about to graduate.”
Northeastern entered four teams into the “Ultimate” tournament and two teams into “Melee.”
Fourth-year mechanical engineering major Joseph Luevanos, whose gamer tag is “Joey Cannoli,” is the second-ranked Northeastern player and has played on the “Ultimate” Northeastern A-Team in all four New England Championship tournaments.
“I feel like I have met a lot of people [through Smash] I would not otherwise meet if I had stuck within my comfort zone,” Luevanos said.
The other teams participating traveled from around the New England and Tri-State areas, including players who are state, nationally and globally ranked.
“I think a lot of the game is psychological. When you play for a really long time, doing the inputs is second nature, so it’s more about figuring out how your opponent plays and figuring out their habits,” said Brent Lee, second-year video production and “Ultimate” player for Fisher College’s team. Lee is ranked third in Massachusetts and 143rd in North America.
Adam Ouldzenagui, a first-year biochemistry major at Suffolk University, is ranked 83rd in the world for “SSB Ultimate” and was the only globally-ranked player in attendance. He began playing the game casually when it was released and joined the competitive scene during the pandemic.
“I didn’t enjoy the game as much as I do now until I started talking to people, and I really love the Massachusetts community. They are great people and very fun to be around,” Ouldzenagui said.
Though the “SSB” community is male-dominated, there were a few female players in the “Ultimate” tournament, one being the team captain of the University of Massachusetts Boston team, Sophia Rivera, a third-year art history major who plays Princess Peach.
“Sometimes I feel a little bit intimidated, only because I feel like people will try to underestimate you and think that you don’t know what you’re doing,” Rivera said. “Luckily, with the people I’ve been surrounded [with] in high school and people who I’ve met in the Boston scene, they’re pretty open to other people playing and to new people.”
Fisher College, the champions of the first MBTA tournament in fall 2023, has a varsity e-sports league with a variety of leagues, including Valorant, Rocket League and Fortnite. The program recruits and offers scholarships to gamers. Their coach, Owen Novelli, is a third-year sports management and accounting double major. Novelli said there are noticeable differences in how gamers play based on where they’re from.
“If you play someone from Tri-State Jersey, [Pennsylvania] and New York … they play very aggressive,” Novelli said. “They run at you; they click a lot of buttons. But if you play someone from down South, their combo moves are generally very put together, so you get hit once and you die, and it’s very messed up.”
Also present at the event was a broadcasting team leading a live stream accessible on Twitch. The team was run externally by Andrew Tham, a tax accountant and Suffolk alum. Tham is the individual technical director and lead producer and runs the broadcasting system as a side job to help tournaments like these.
“I started this small production side hustle to operate in communities like this where they don’t have the infrastructure to have a larger broadcast and good quality stream,” Tham said. Working under him were three broadcasters hired by Tham, including George ElMassih, a math teacher and Northeastern alum.
“I think that the goal of commentary is to make it accessible for people that aren’t as cued in,” ElMassih said. With past experience playing on Northeastern’s “Ultimate” Team, ElMassih uses his knowledge and insight to create a better experience for their audience.
“You’re making it exciting for the people watching so that they can both get involved with what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening outside of the screen in the greater context of the match,” ElMassih said.
Though the club was not officially established until 2023, Northeastern has always had an active “SSB” community. Northeastern alum Luke Nardini was introduced to the game while a first-year at Northeastern. Nardini graduated in 2022 with a degree in computer science but still helps run the tournaments.
“[Smash] was a big thing in my common room in White Hall,” Nardini said. “It’s been really fun to see the size of the organization grow.”
The club meets for weekly practice sessions on Mondays, “Melee” tournaments on Wednesdays and “Ultimate” tournaments on Fridays. There is no experience required to join the club and compete in tournaments. Dylan Bretschneider, a fourth-year bioengineering major who is on Northeastern’s “SSB” electoral board as a tournament organizer, said the community around “Super Smash Bros.” is one that brings people together.
“I’ve made a lot of friends and a lot of memories through this club, and I feel very excited and very confident it’s going to continue on, and it’s going to keep growing,” Bretschneider said.
