Interview: Armada

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Among the growing list of competitive gaming or “e-sports” titles being played, the Super Smash Bros Melee series remains unique. Never intended for competitive play, the four-person party game has fostered a dedicated fan base that has continued to grow long after its release in 2001. This past weekend, hundreds of Smashers headed to McMaster University to attend McSmashter 4, the largest Canadian Melee tournament to date, hoping to prove their talents and show just how exciting Smash can be.

After his impressive first place victory, I sat down with Adam Lindgren aka “Armada”, the 21-year-old world-class competitive Melee player from Gothenburg, Sweden, to talk about Melee, e-sports, and the growth of the game he loves.

Despite its age, the competitive Melee scene has grown a lot in the last few years. What do you attribute this growth to, and do you think the scene will continue to grow?

There’s two reasons. First off, The Smash Brothers documentary was getting huge. I heard a lot of players from all over the world, like in my city Gothenburg, or Australia when I was there, saying that they watched the documentary and that got them interested in the game.

Also, when Nintendo tried to shut down the Evo 2013 stream that was covered by a lot of huge websites, so the story of Melee being at Evo, and then almost being cancelled because of Nintendo … so many people saw that and got interested. Then when [Melee] ended up being such a huge success and was the third biggest game [at Evo], it was really exciting for everyone in the community.

So I think for a lot of people, the documentary made them realize that there is a competitive community for this game, and people who liked to play this game [before learning about the scene] realized that this game is very deep, and has a lot of potential. Evo 2013 ended up getting 145,000 viewers, which really showed our potential.

Even though Melee has had a dedicated competitive community for quite some time, it’s still small in comparison to larger e-sports titles. What do you feel the competitive Melee needs to do in order to grow and develop the scene?

The thing is we are growing a lot right now, tournaments are growing in numbers for sure. Already in 2015, we’ve had more tournaments with 100 plus entrants than we had in all of 2013, and we aren’t even in March yet.  So I guess we need to keep up the good work. If we continue to work as a community, more people will find out about us.

Beyond that, if we had huge companies behind us that would help us a lot more. Twitch was helping us a lot for Apex 2015, showing support by tweeting out our streams, which meant we got more people watching our tournaments, which hopefully means more people will start going to tournaments.

I believe Melee has all the potential in the world to be one of the main e-sports, but the community can only do so much. Obviously we can do more—we are still far from optimized, but if we eventually want to become one of the biggest e-sports, then we need the support from huge companies. The best thing would be if Nintendo was showing some real support, like what Capcom or Valve is doing for their games. It would be good if we could get Nintendo behind us, but I doubt that because Nintendo is... [laughs] is Nintendo.

I hope these companies give us a chance, because I feel the Melee community has showed so many times that we are reliable, we can do this, and I honestly want to say that we deserve to be one of the biggest.

So you would say that Nintendo is holding back this scene a bit?

If Nintendo was showing us support, I don’t see any limitations for this community, but they aren’t on the same page with us right now I think. For example, Nintendo is doing a lot of remakes right now, and if they made a Melee HD for Wii U, and supported the Melee community that would change so much, and they would make so much money. It’s hard for me to understand why they don’t do that.

Besides lack of support from Nintendo, are there other factors that are holding back the scene?

I feel like the average person doesn’t see the big picture. They don’t see the impact that small things can have. Everyone who donated to get Melee at Evo 2013 is part of the reason that the game is growing, but you can’t really stop there. It doesn’t even have to be money—holding tournaments, helping out at tournaments, commentating, being a good player to inspire others to community, all these things make a difference.

I know a lot of people want the community to grow, but some aren’t really willing to put in the effort. I think they need to understand that any community can die without people working for the community. Melee would be far from where it is now without Samox (Travis Beauchamp, the director of The Smash Brothers documentary), and people donating to get Melee at Evo 2013. Having more than 100 people at a tournament before those things would be unusual, which shows how much of a difference you can make.

I think more people could do more, and would do more, if they realized how important these things are for the community to grow. So I hope that is about to change, but we will see.

As far as your own efforts, how have you helped grow the scene?

A lot of events I’ve been helping out here and there, but right now I’m one of the main tournament organizers for the B.E.A.S.T. series [in Sweden], which 440 people attended at our last event. That really showed that the European scene can also bring in large numbers, we just need people to hold tournaments.

Also, once I reach 500 subscribers on my stream (twitch.tv/ArmadaUGS), I’m going to use the money to fly in a top American Smasher to Europe, and hold a tournament for that player so they can compete with me and the rest of the European top players. All of this is really to try and bring the European and North American communities together.

You’re known in the scene for really popularizing the use of Peach as a viable character. What made you decide to start playing Peach?

The thing is, before I entered the Melee community in early 2005 we had these “Nintendo championships” in Sweden, and this included all kinds of different games. I remember seeing this guy playing Peach - and I had no idea what crouch-cancelling was at the time - but it seemed like [Peach’s] down smash did 60 percent every time and I thought that was amazing.

After one and a half years of playing and experimenting with other characters I realized that my potential with Peach was higher than other characters, and after watching some of the North American Peaches, I noticed that they weren’t using a lot of techniques I had found. So I started to figure out how the character should be played, and I realized that if these players can place top five without playing the character with knowledge and techniques I had, I should be able to be the best in the world.

Given the growth over the last few years, it feels there has never been a better time to start playing competitive Melee. If you had to convince someone to get involved in the competitive Smash scene, who didn’t know anything about it, what would you say to them?

Don’t judge a book by its cover, you might miss the opportunity of a lifetime.

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