If you’re an avid reader of the Jim Morrison blog, you’ll know a lot of the Dutch Melee heroes, who worked their ass off to keep this community thriving during dark times, and expanded it during the booming days. MrSilver, Marc, Remen, Jimmy, Seo, Nuckels, Supergoomba you name them. They rightly deserve all the praise going their way. However, today I want to highlight some of the lesser known members of the Melee community who have made significant contributions, which either just flew under the radar, or have been buried by the sands of time.
Ace
Have you played Project M? Taken a look at the old PR? Simply an old player? Chances are many of the Dutch players (and those abroad!) will know who Ace is. His contributions to the scene may be lesser known.
When you were a TO in the olden days, CRT TV’s were far and few between, with people bringing maybe 1 or 2 CRT’s if you were lucky. One man stood above them all: Ace would bring a truckload of them, sometimes six at a time. Getting Ace to come to your tournament meant your TV problems were solved. The tournament couldn’t even begin until our ‘hofleverancier van CRTs’ had arrived.
Besides that, Ace also hosted tournaments in his house, just when I started playing, around 2010-2012. These Ace Smashfests were cozy relics of the past that make my COVID-mind hurl, where we were shouting in a small bedroom shoulder to shoulder as Jeapie would beat up Amsah.
Less Melee-related, but still noteworthy: Ace has been one of the driving forces behind the early success of Project M in The Netherlands, and remains one of the country’s best players.
TO Alex & ShadowTL
If Jeffz0r is the grandfather of Brabant Melee, it would be right to call these two the fathers of Brabant Melee. I’m putting them in the same slot, because they both fill the roll of premier Brabant TO when this scene was in its infancy.
While Brabant is now one of the strongest regions in Dutch Melee, this was absolutely not the case for the longest time. The best players, Adam and Jimmy, felt closer to Zuid-Holland, with the other notable player being Jeffz0r. When ShadowTL started hosting Hall Of Melee in Tilburg from 2013 until 2014, it attracted players from all over the country to come to this forgotten corner of the country and compete in an arcade. Slowly but surely, more local players started joining and a semblance of a Brabant scene emerged. At this point, ShadowTL stopped organizing Hall Of Melee, but thankfully, another TO took over.
Alex started organizing the Smash Brabant series in 2014, right after the boom in Dutch players due to the smash doc and EVO. These tournaments were very well attended, ranging from the 40s to the 100s, often combining Melee and Project M. These tournaments were held in a game store, and if you look through the photos, there’s a good chance you’ll see your favorite player, or yourself! It was also here that I saw lot of the ‘old guard of Brabant’ for the first time: Paydough, Bawr, QT, Old Niels (and it was also here where Stijn whooped my ass for the first time). At later iterations, many of the PR’d players we know and love from Brabant showed up for the first time, including Alex Bailey.
Mind Trick
Okay, most of you probably do know Mind Trick and why he is included in this, but only as a relic of the past, so I want to take you back to where it started.
The year is 2014 and The Netherlands had its last official Power Ranking in 2007. We all knew who were the best players, but below that, it got really fuzzy. Enter Mind Trick. Using a program based on the TrueSkill algorithm, Mind Trick finally created the ranking, which was quickly adopted as the official Dutch Power Ranking for the first time in years. This coincided with an explosive growth in the Dutch scene, with many new players joining. Well, fuck, the power ranking only showed the top 20. That’s a nice goal for newer players, but wouldn’t it be even nicer if they could see their progress against their peers in the meantime?
This is where Mind Trick created SmashRanking.eu, one of the most important websites for European smash between 2015 and 2017. Users could submit tournament results and Mind Trick would manually curate their results to feed them into the algorithm, which produced an objective ranking of all European players in one list. At first this was only used by Dutch players, but was quickly expanded to include all tournaments in Europe.
The drive that this ranking instilled in many players should not be underestimated. The improvement that you could see in your score after every tournament you performed well at was a major boost in confidence. Grinding for that one higher spot, top 20 in The Netherlands, top 50 in Europe, being better than Jeffz0r… Whatever your goal was, SmashRanking.eu made sure you could track your progress. The success of this major website also became its downfall, with more and more tournaments being submitted and Mind Trick having to process everything on its own. It was extremely thankless, as international players made a huge point of including weeklies, invalidating certain results and bitching to Mind Trick that his algorithm didn’t work properly. Eventually, due to the negativity and a disinterest from Mind Trick, the project was discontinued and SmashRanking.eu went offline. Ever since, there have been many trial balloons for similar projects, but they never took off in the way that SmashRanking.eu was a European-wide hub.
Joeri / Ryuker
It’s likely you know Ryuker already, but I feel his contributions to the community have gone underappreciated for quite a while, so I wanted to shine a light on them today. See all the pictures in this post? Uploaded by Ryuker. Probably even taken by Ryuker.
Ryuker has been playing almost as long as the game itself, starting in the dark ages of 2005/6. Ever since he started, he’s been involved with many out-of-game aspects of Melee which were neglected.
One of the most notable contributions Ryuker is his documentation in the olden times. Almost all videos posted to the official SmashNederland youtube channel are by Ryuker. Photos dating from this era almost exclusively were taken by Ryuker. Many results/videos threads on Smashboard were maintained by Ryuker. Besides this, his role in social media organization for European smash has certainly gotten a few people to start playing Melee. SmashNL social media posts have been maintained by Ryuker, both on Facebook and Twitter. SmashEurope? Ryuker! While Ryuker no longer actively plays, he still attends major tournaments and maintains an active role in Smash in the background. Most importantly, his connections between major TO’s in the European backroom still make him an important conduit for the whole European scene, and one of the most well-known international names for European TO’s.
Virgil / AFK Esports
Any Dutch player reading this, there is a 1000% chance your teammate is an AFK kid.
Making light-hearted fun of Virgil has been a favourite pastime of the Dutch Melee scene, in part because Virgil has never been an actual player of the game. However, it would be a disservice to him to talk about unsung heroes and gloss over the contributions made by AFK Esports.
In the absolute BOOMING days of Melee in 2015, The Netherlands also saw an immense influx of players. The barren days of three new players a year were over. This also meant an increased thirst for more Melee. The bi-monthly Avalons wouldn’t cut it. The irregular separate tournaments would be too spread out. We were missing stable, good practice. Enter Jur & Virgil.
With a venue at Gamers Of The West, the first true weekly was established by Virgil, with Jur providing the hook-up to the smash-scene. The partnership between me and Virgil ran for nearly 2 years, changing venues, seeing players come and go, but never faltering in providing a proving ground for everyone in the Randstad and beyond. I have seen almost everyone who was active in the Dutch scene come to the Thursday AFK weeklies, with many currently PR’d players having their first Smash experience ever there. This meant weekly practice with Ser, JP, Stijn, Jim Morrison, KasparV, Jimmy, Coen, Enig, Avalancer/Nebbii, Fatih, and literally everyone else. We’ve had Baxon and Westballz over in the 6mx6m classroom packed with 40 people, we’ve seen the rise of Vliegende Snor, Brabant Melee and Jim Morrison’s alcoholism. The AFK days are some of my fondest Melee memories due to how consistent it was, something that stings even more in pandemic-times.
After the unfortunate loss of venues for AFK Rotterdam due to anti-kraak being unreliable as hell, the weekly event did not return. Thankfully, a number of other TO’s were inspired by AFK and had started their own weeklies, with Arrakis becoming the longest running weekly in Dutch history. Since then, Virgil has had a lovely relationship with the Dutch Melee community, becoming one of the main suppliers of TV’s for tournament series such as Syndicate, Dreamhack and START.
Jim Morrison's Melee Tidbits 