Get Smashed

The community of Smash devotees at Harvard is a small and fiercely competitive one. Smash, of course, is Super Smash Bros., a best-selling multiplayer Nintendo 64 game. Not content simply to play among roommates and friends, William O. Gallery ’04 and Peter F. Epstein ’04 helped organize a Smash tournament last Saturday to award Smash-derived bragging rights to one smasher. “We had three groups of people that all claimed they were the best Smash players in the school and we all wanted to settle the score,” Epstein says. Before anyone even picked up a controller, a flurry of increasingly vitriolic e-mails flew between would-be competitors in this invitation-only event. The players, whittled down to a mere 16 for the tourney, kicked off the competition at tournament headquarters (Cabot I-42) just after 5 p.m. Play lasted more than three hours, and when the pixelated carnage was over, Timothy R. Hoey ’04 of Currier House emerged victorious.

Smash, released for Nintendo 64 in 1999, pits well-known characters from a variety of classic Nintendo games against each other in a free-for-all melee. Breaking with standard Nintendo narrative form, Luigi uppercuts Kirby, who in turn spiral-kicks Mario. Up to four human competitors can man the controls in this gruesome battle.

Often, and particularly under the influence of alcohol, the line between Smash and real life can be blurred, as players take out their gaming failures by destroying controllers, tossing chairs against walls and occasionally physically assaulting their opponents. But on Saturday, everyone’s mind was on victory—the keg in the corner of the room remained untapped until the last kill was had.

“Everyone was screaming and yelling,” says David W. Smith ’04, a member of the blocking group that hosted the event.

For Hoey, who brought his own game controller with him to the tournament, his masterful wrangling of Kirby to take the Harvard Smash Bros. title was something to be proud of. Says the champion: “I’m glad that all my hard work at Harvard has finally paid off.”