The video game industry has changed a lot over the years, going from simple 2-dimensional, pixelated games like Pong to elaborate multi-player networks with a global reach. In 2019, the US video game industry generated a whopping $90+billion and supported approximately 430,000 jobs. This translated to over $12 billion in local, state, and federal taxes. In the US alone, there are currently over 180 million gamers and over 2 billion worldwide.
One such gamer has made it his mission to grow the sport of gaming regionally and statewide by promoting competition, specifically Smash Bros. “I want to emphasize that the large majority of people who enter these brackets are not professionals,” said tournament director Salvatore White. “I have entered tournaments like this since the game came out in December 2018, and I hardly ever profit. I play for the community experience, I play because of my competitive drive I developed from playing baseball and basketball growing up, and I play for the wonderful feeling of seeing improvement.”
The tournament, Save Point 2, will take place on Saturday, July 30th, at the Williamsport Scottish Rite in downtown Williamsport. The venue opens at 10 a.m. & events start at 11 a.m.. Registration for competitors ends July 23rd and must be done online on their registration page start.gg/savepoint. Passes are $30-$40, and entry toward the singles bracket is $10. Spectator passes are $20 and can be purchased online on their registration page or at the door.
For those unfamiliar with gaming tournaments and video games in general, Save Point 2 is the second edition of Pennsylvania’s biggest Super Smash Bros. Ultimate event, the main event of which is a double elimination bracket. Smash Bros. is a platform fighting game created by Masahiro Sakurai & developed by Nintendo that pits the most popular faces in gaming against each other, from Mario and Pikachu to Pac-Man and Minecraft Steve. “We compete in the most recent iteration, Super Smash Bros. (Smash) Ultimate. A platform fighting game differs from a traditional fighting game in that instead of a health bar, as your character is damaged, they build “percent,” which causes them to fly farther as they take each hit. If you fly far enough off of the stage, you will hit the “blast zone,” which causes you to lose your “stock,” which is essentially one of the lives you get before you lose,” said White.
Smash has the ability to customize game modes to a large degree. Competitive Smash tournaments have a ruleset designed completely by the community to decrease randomness and showcase player skill as much as possible. This is done by disabling items that spawn randomly around the stage and banning many stages in the game which are too big, small, or random to be suitable for competitive play. Competitors play with three stocks and a timer of 7 minutes per game. The tournament format is a double elimination bracket, with best-of-three game sets for each match. Near the end of the tournament, sets will be best-of-five instead. The events are also organized by the community. This is because Nintendo does not support competitive Smash financially like developers do for other esports. This means that, compared to other tournaments, competitors play for much smaller cash prizes. “Our community is driven by a passion for the game. There are tournaments in Smash all over the globe ranging from 10 to 80-person locals to larger regionals with 500 players to 3,500-person majors. The player-base is mostly late teens to early twenties, but even some of the best players are mid-teens and late twenties,” said White.
Citing Pennsylvania’s poor showing in previous competitions, White is on a mission to improve player performance and the popularity of this game. “Pennsylvania is an underwhelming region for Smash Ultimate. For our population, we are not as good as we should be. New York, California, Florida, and Texas, the states that are bigger than us, are all significantly better. Many states smaller than us, like Georgia, New Jersey, & Michigan, are also clearly better. In Ultimate’s lifespan, there have been two worldwide rankings, and neither time was a PA player ranked in the top 50. Almost every time PA runs a regional event, a player from a bordering state travels here & wins the tournament. However, our best player, Willow “IcyMist” Barto of Slippery Rock, is very close to breaking into the top 50 due to massive improvement from practice over quarantine. She will be our highest-seeded player going into Save Point, with registered players from ten other states looking to take her and us down. I want us to defend our turf so we can stop being overlooked as a region. I think it would be a good step toward breaking into the first tier of states for Smash talent.”
Other top players in the region include Joel “Beast” Veras of Allentown and Aaron “BONK!” Markovitz of Wayne, Ryan “Yoda Cage” Schrier of Philadelphia, and Anthony “MPg” Casale, who lives in Delaware but travels across the PA border on a weekly basis to practice and compete in Philadelphia-region locals. “IcyMist mostly competes at locals in Pittsburgh, whereas the other four mostly compete at locals in the Philadelphia area. They also practice by traveling to regionals and majors across the east coast and beyond. Just this past weekend, Beast, Yoda Cage, and MPg flew to Las Vegas for a major tournament called Double Down, where Yoda Cage and MPg did well, both placing 65th out of 987 entrants,” said White. Pennsylvania is split into three main regions. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, & Central (which includes the Harrisburg area). Each region holds weekly tournaments.
Anyone in the Williamsport area that is interested in competing in Smash Ultimate can connect with the Smash Club at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. The club hosts weekly tournaments during the school year. During the summer, the biweekly tournaments are held on Fridays at the hobby shop, Nerd Haven, in Lock Haven. For more information about Smash tournaments in Pennsylvania, contact Salvatore White on Twitter at @salvatore_slate.
