2019 Offline Super Smash Bros. 64 Ranking Europe

Introduction

We are proud to announce that the European Super Smash Bros. scene has finally made efforts to create an offline power ranking, which, so far, has never been done before in a public and “official” way. This post, therefore, is not only the release of this ranking, but also a document to give some context to our endeavor.¹

There have been many discussions around the creation of some sort of public official power ranking for offline European Super Smash Bros. performances, especially in the hidden TO backroom channel on our Discord server. Kaki gathered all data of the relevant offline tournaments (which tournaments are “relevant” is mostly undisputed), and created a ranking with the help of TrueSkill, a popular ranking system developed by Microsoft, which (re)sparked the current discussion. There was concern about Kaki publishing the ranking, as this would then be the first and only publicly posted ranking, which would run the risk of being the standard reference, even though this list does not reflect a consensus.

Some members of the TO and Mod backroom from the Discord server then contacted all members of the scene that were deemed relevant to join the creation of this list. The result of this was the formation of a private chat consisting of Bert, Kaki, Olikus, and Anotherish. In this chat, discussions for a public ranking took place, leading to the formation of this backroom. The four of us are hereby announcing the creation of a ranking for offline performances of players from the European Super Smash Bros. scene for the year of 2019.

We would like to thank Hartinator for helping us with this article, as well as Bert’s mom for proofreading.

¹ This part of the article is copied mostly from the announcement on our outdated and defunct blog.

Ranking Procedure

We fully stress that this is a subjective list. We would still like to be as transparent as possible with the way we formed our conclusions. Most likely, our future lists will be done differently.

• All results considered are from this list of tournaments (only those in 2019), and including exactly these tournaments is mostly undisputed in the community.
• We only included players who had attended at least 2 tournaments in this list.
• The data from these tournaments were put into a ranking system of braacket.com, based on TrueSkill, which was the main guide for the ranking.
• We adjusted the ranking to reflect our perceived “true” skill of the players

Furthermore, our decisions on the ranking were mostly made by consensus. This means that we didn’t just vote for every spot on the list and take the majority decision, but we discussed everything through until we came to unanimous agreement, a consensus. There were only a few instances where we all agreed to have a vote, even including people outside of this backroom, but this procedure was used as more of a last resort.

Ranking List

Panelists: Anotherish, Bert, Kaki, Olikus

Jam is undoubtedly the best offline player in Europe. He has been a part of the Smash scene for a very long time, and is an old school Melee player, the best in the UK in 2007 even. Fuzzyness, who later trumped him in Melee, was his main training partner both for that game and for Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 back in the day. Focusing less on Melee, Jam has stayed loyal to the first installment of the Smash series, and he is still going strong, only getting better and better.

2019 was a very successful year for him, outplacing every European in every tournament he attended. He didn’t win the Brussels meetup in January, where he finished second, losing to Josh Brody in winners and grand finals, but make no mistake: Jam’s showing at that tournament was indeed impressive. He crushed the rest of his competition, including Shears, whom he double eliminated, avenging his very close lost set against him back in 2017 at BEAST 7. At Hitstun 6 in Texas, a tournament for which his trip was crowdfunded, he proved that he can even beat Josh Brody, taking a set in pools and also defeating several other well-known US players like NaCl, CTG & Zero, placing 2nd, only behind Josh Brody. There is only one person in Europe who can truly challenge Jam, the mysterious keyboard player Samsun, whom nobody has ever seen in person. According to recent online tournaments though, Jam currently has the upper hand.

$hEiCk^ is an old-school player from Barcelona, who got good with his long time training partner Fruity, who also still lives there. He moved to Berlin temporarily, where he helped the scene grow in 2016 to 2018, after which he moved back to Catalonia. $hEiCk^ is not just an offline player, he is very active in the online scene, where he has had a strong presence even before there was our Discord room. He has a glowing energy and drive to play Smash, frequently asking for dales, at various times of the day, going for long, fun sessions, being good with the entire cast of the game and being one of the best 12-character-battle players in Europe. He sometimes goes so far as to suggest that he is an “online player”, stating that he usually plays better online than offline.

$hEiCk^ has nutured a small rivalry with Hartinator. Being stubborn with his character choices, he has lost multiple times against him in 2018 with his Fox, and in 2019 his Falcon also wasn’t able to beat him. Currently, $hEiCk^ not only is considered to have the upper hand over Hartinator based on recent online results (mainly playing Pikachu against Kirby), but the rest of his offline results have also been very strong, outplacing Hartinator at Fête and showing an impressive performance at the first Brussels meetup.

In the summer of 2017, the PhD student Hartinator hosted a Smash 64 side event at a Melee tournament in Bayreuth, where he got to meet and lose to the “stars” (his words) that he had seen in the live stream of BEAST 7, which inspired him to get involved with the offline scene. That year was the last he would lose to them though, refining his scary, precise blue Kirby rapidly throughout the next years. In 2019, he proved to be amongst Europe’s finest, finishing as the second best European at the internationally stacked Brussels meetup, and further trumping his competition at his own tournament in Bayreuth, securing first place.

Hartinator is a true community person: Not only does he attend a lot of tourneys, he also currently hosts the weekly “Battle of Europe” online tourney series. In offline events, where players of the other Smash scenes are present, he is always sure to bring a bunch of GameCube controller to N64 adapters, so that they might become interested in our scene.

Bert is a very passionate and competitive player that first started with Melee and later discovered his interest in 64 after he met fellow mathematicians Alex and Danny in Berlin. At their university, they started the Berlin scene in a hangout room which later functioned as the venue for some of the first international Smash 64 meetups in Europe. With training from $hEiCk^, who lived there at the time, they flew to Sweden to participate in BEAST 7, where Bert was underseeded because nobody knew about him. There he had impressive wins over Fuzzyness and Meromorph in pools before beating Olikus in bracket, which started a very long and tight back-and-forth rivalry.

Bert started off his Smash 64 career as a Pikachu main with a Yoshi secondary. He not only switched to a GameCube controller to help his technique for his well-known DI, but since 2019 he has also gone all Falcon, developing very strong fundamentals for the character. This resulted in a strong 2nd place at the second Brussels meetup of the year. One thing is for sure: The mathematician with a mullet will be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

When Aueh joined the online scene after noticing the Berlin meetup in 2018, people thought he was an alt of some old school player. With his unorthodox and intuition-based play style, he has often surprised many top players in online friendlies and tournaments. Challenging Aueh’s claims about how he got so good, even with multiple characters, the legendary Samsun said that he didn’t think one could “get this knowledgeable about the meta by just playing bots”. Since then, Aueh being an alt of a player like Samsun was a running gag in the European Discord. But guess what? Aueh came in, in the flesh, to the Brussels meetup and proved us all wrong, presenting his raw talent to everyone. Not much later at Fête, Aueh made all of our jaws drop by not only beating JimmyJoe and $hEiCk^, but especially by taking a set off of Jam, the first player from Europe to do so at an offline tournament.

Due to being a natural at this game with rapid improvement, Aueh has been dubbed “the prodigy”, and everyone is eager to see his future in the competitive scene. Since the “The Revival of Brabant” by new player StoneyMalony in early 2020, he now has an offline scene close to him to show and increase his skill.

Olikus, another old-school player, who was one of the most well known posters in the Smashboards forums back in the day, is responsible for creating the Oslo Smash 64 scene, currently the biggest offline scene there is in Europe. Today he is still very active in the scene, being a content creator on YouTube and a co-host of a lot of events in Europe. A well-varied player able to play the whole cast, Olikus plays Pikachu, Falcon, Kirby and even Samus in tournament, never letting his opponent be sure who he will pick. Olikus’ playstyle is considered to be very defensive, careful and analytic. Even though Pikachu and Falcon are his most commonly picked characters, his Kirby has had greater success in certain matchups, notably Bert’s Pikachu and Falcon, but Olikus doesn’t like playing Kirby too often, considering it to be too exhausting.

Aside from his training partners in Oslo, DareDemon and Meromorph, Olikus is in touch with the scene in Japan, where he lives on and off, which has enabled him to get training from Jouske. His long reign as number one in Norway has given him the nickname “king of the north”. Recently, though, returning old-school player Mats is giving him a run for his money, winning Vivaldi Autumn over Olikus.

The man who once conducted an orchestra playing video game soundtracks while studying music at university can easily impress you with the variety of instruments he can virtuously play — including an N64 controller. When AEROSHEeP’s fingers are not busy playing some awesome, spherical guitar riffs for his successful dream pop band ”Le Groupe Obscur”, he will try to join as many SSB64 tournaments as possible. It doesn’t matter if it is at an online or an offline tournament, to which, being the only active French Smash 64 player, he is always motivated to travel: AEROSHeEP is a true competitor in the best way imaginable. You can be sure he plays his heart out whenever you meet him in bracket, but in the end, there will be neither salt nor hard feelings since he is arguably the nicest and funniest guy you can spend your time with.

Starting out as THE Ness main in Europe in 2016, he became more dedicated to his Pikachu in 2018 with increasing success. In the first half of 2019, his placings continued to rise from a seemingly new approach to the neutral game, taking more and more sets from higher seeded players. His shift to concentrate more on Fox and Ness in the second half of 2019 led to a slight decrease in his placings, but he still seems to look in only one direction within the rankings: upwards.

One of the most active players in the offline community, software engineer and web developer Anotherish plays a huge part in both the local Oslo scene and the international European scene. Provider of several Everdrives, overclocked consoles for teams, stream setups, and taking care of the European preset pack for Project64KVE, Anotherish is a vital contributor to making the Smash 64 scene in Europe more efficient and professional. Online, Anotherish regularly helps newcomers set up online play. Despite all this, he rarely plays online and is one of the few players that doesn’t attend online tournaments, considering them to not be competitive.

His broad knowledge of the game on a technical level helps his in-game decision making and flow chart playstyle. Since the beginning of Europe’s recent offline era in late 2016, Anotherish has been one of the most prominent commentators, bringing lots of gameplay knowledge to the table. He often teams up with his childhood friend Mornajens in doubles, who also has been his main training partner for many years. In the Oslo bi-weekly ”House of Smash”, Anotherish usually makes it to grand finals against Olikus, and even though he hasn’t won a tournament yet, he is getting closer and closer, 2019 being the first year where he was able to take sets off of him. He mostly played Pikachu in 2019, but is also known for his previous main, Captain Falcon, a Jigglypuff, and a Luigi, the ”tall green plumber” whom Fruity often jokes about being his true main.

Positivex, also known as ”Posi”, started up the Brussels 64 scene by bringing setups to his office. He is the owner of a successful startup that created a baby-sitting service. With fellow colleague Sayotuke he hosts small local tourneys and the international Brussels meetups. In 2019, Lawliver started studying in Brussels and could be part of several training sessions with Positivex. This, combined with a dedicated mindset, has helped Positivex to improve a lot this year. His Falcon has been doing better in several match-ups, and he started to use a pocket Pikachu in some matchups like Mario to great success. If he can manage to continue the grind, it might not take long until he breaks into the next tier of European players. Posi has been an active traveler, attending tournaments in both Oslo and Berlin. He is a very friendly and helpful person, always trying to help the offline scene, and has been a great addition to the European Smash 64 community in the most recent years.

When Bart first joined the scene online in September of 2017, it was soon apparent that he would be someone to keep an eye on. In no time he improved his already substantial self-taught skills by an impressive amount. Not even 2 months later, he convincingly defeated Hartinator, who visited him in Delft, in a 12 Character Battle, much to the surprise of Hartinator. Having remained skillful with the entire cast, his Pikachu first evolved as his best character alongside Captain Falcon. With them, he pulled off a strong performance at his first console tournament at Vivaldi Autumn 2018, where he made it to top 8. Bart is also a frequent commentator for offline tournaments.

In 2019, his placings dropped a bit, but one has to keep in mind that he dedicated himself to his less developed characters in that year, namely Ness and Fox. Together with the fact that he manages to balance his Smash career with his PhD studies in Control Engineering, it is likely that we have not yet seen everything he has got.

Summary Artwork

Honorable Mentions

These are the players that only participated in one tournament in 2019, but would have most likely been ranked 10th place or higher, if they had attended more tournaments.