Nintendo cannot kill Super Smash Bros. Melee esports

Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma arrived at Evo 2025 with cash, a GameCube controller, and a sign that said “BEAT ME WIN $$$.” Crowds formed around him all weekend to watch him beat anyone who dared sit down to test their luck against the Melee God. Nintendo may have banned Melee from being at Evo, but that was not about to stop the FGC community at all.

Nintendo has been actively attempting to shut down Super Smash Bros. esports for years, from sending cease and desists, implementing strict guidelines, and shutting down tournaments. Through it all, the Smash esports community — including 20-plus-year-old Melee — has fought back.

Despite Nintendo’s lack of financial support, there are crowd-funded tournaments, pros hosting online challenges, and content creators providing travel arrangements for competitors. You won’t make a lot of money playing Melee — even the highest-level competitors have not made more at a lifetime of tournaments than a casual Smash player made on a 16-day Jeopardy streak. — but it’s become more about grit, passion, bragging rights, and a big F-you to Nintendo.

Nintendo Can’t Stop Melee From Being at Evo

“We had all the hope. We thought, maybe this time, maybe this time, we would finally catch a break,” Hungrybox said after Evo announced that Nintendo was pulling Smash from its fighting game lineup.

Melee has been around since 2001, and its esports scene has been stubbornly continuing ever since. Throughout the last few decades, Nintendo has made blatant attempts to shut down Melee esports, including massive regulations that limit prizing and registration sizes at tourneys, leaving the community frustrated. Tournament organizers have continued to shut down due to a lack of funding and not wanting to get in the way of the way of the lawsuit-happy company. Certain modded games have to be played in small conference rooms away from the rest of the tournament and prize pools don’t even cover flights and hotel stays.

“Fuck Nintendo, yeah I said it! Cancel all these tourneys and act like we’ll forget it! Built the scene our damn selves, you don’t get no credit” rapped Kashan “Chillindude” Khan rapped a few years ago.

When accepting a reward for Joseph “Mang0” Marquez at the Streamer Awards, Hungrybox said of his rival: “It’s not the flashiest game, it’s not the biggest game, we don’t have the most money by far. But Mang0 did more than a certain company called Nintendo did. I hope this year, with the circuit they’re doing, they hopefully finally give us a chance we never had.

“Even though we’re not at Evo and a lot of other events, Smash is a beautiful game and deserves to shine. Hopefully this game lives on another 20 years.”

Shocker: Nintendo did not. The circuit fell apart due to corporate greed and a lack of understanding of the Smash scene. This ultimately brought even more stress to the Smash ecosystem, shutting down Majors like the Smash World Tour.

One of the most memorable times that Nintendo messed with the Melee scene was Evo 2022. Due to Sony’s involvement in the massive fighting game event, Nintendo pulled Super Smash Bros. Melee and Ultimate out of the lineup. It’s been gone ever since, removing Melee from the mainstream fighting game esports scene.

But this year at Evo 2025, Hungrybox — one of the top players in the world after decades of domination with Jigglypuff — decided to bring Melee to the event anyway. He set up a CRTV and a GameCube, then invited people to play him for money, one of the staples of Smash culture at its own events. The money match.

Throughout the weekend, people paid $5 to try and take down Hungrybox near the FlyQuest booth, but he unsurprisingly wiped every single one of them. By the end of the first day, Hungrybox’s jackpot was at $815. He continued to stream his Melee setup throughout the entire weekend, bringing the old-school, homegrown feel of grassroots Melee to Evo once more.

This is the spirit of Melee. It refuses to die. It claws its way back. That’s due to the passion of the community and its top players, who continue to fund events and online tourneys themselves. The winners of the Evo tournaments got tens of thousands of dollars and qualified for even bigger tournaments in their games’ respective circuits. Hungrybox got a few hundred bucks. But that was worth it to him to fly out, just to represent Melee, support his community, and continue keeping the game alive.

Nintendo can put as many regulations and financial burdens on the Smash community as it wants. But it can’t crush the spirit of Melee. It only fuels it even more. Melee is here to stay.