Usually, when you hit the credit streak in a game, you either make fun or lie down and absorb it slowly, but not in Smash Bros. The group fighting game franchise is known for having a mini-game at the end of the single-player campaign where players are tasked with zapping each name before it disappears from the screen. It’s such an iconic part of the series that you would think that someone would have gotten the top score on the most revered entry in the franchise, Super Smash Bros. Melee, but not.
By 2021, absolutely no one had managed to reach all 190 names in the Melee sequence. But then a man by the name of Nathaniel Bandy launched a challenge to the community: The first person to get all the credits right would win $ 3,000 out of Bandy’s pocket. The execution had to be on real hardware and recorded so that viewers could see the actual inputs on the controller. The deadline would be March 31, also known as meme day, when some Nintendo games arbitrarily disappear from existence.
More than a week later, someone – Martin Zarate – finally worked. Zarate told Polygon via Twitter that it took about 50 hours to complete, with practice for individual sections lasting about 12 hours each.
“The most challenging part would be the voice actors, they come in all directions and there is no room for error,” he said. “Once you get the hardest part of the credits, you’ll be composed and beat the rest.”
According to Zarate, it probably took so long for someone to do this because there was no incentive associated with it. The last known record happened more than a decade ago, in 2007, when a player managed to hit 182 of the strings. But also, Zarate recognized that it is a challenging task.
“You had to learn a different control style, memorize the pattern and the very difficult executive inputs,” he said.
The money, he said, will go towards his monthly fee – Zarate is graduating from parks and natural resources, with the hope of perhaps becoming a forest ranger.
For now, however, the Melee community is celebrating its achievements. One stop Melee Player Mew2King wrote in the comments for the YouTube video: “Wait for real ???”