Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
On Saturday, March 3, Ben Thuronyi ’07 and Manoli Strecker ’07 organized Swarthmore’s first Smash Brothers Melee tournament. The game is Nintendo’s most successful GameCube product, with more than 6 million sales, according to Internet Gaming Network. Over the past three years, Ben Thuronyi and Manoli Strecker have played more than 5,995 battles, and finally decided it was high time to bring the game to a wider Swarthmore audience. “We organized the tournament to bring out other Smash lovers on campus, test our skills against theirs,” explained Ben Thuronyi.
The tournament was seeded and double-elimination. After an intense four rounds, Brian Lopez ’07 blasted his way to victory with a 4-0 record, followed closely by Jaime Cardenas-Navia ’07.
Unfortunately, because Thuronyi and Strecker wanted to hold the first tournament before Spring Break, the tournament overlapped significantly with the semester’s Large Scale Event, the comedian Wanda Sykes. Despite hopes for higher attendance, there were only eight entrants.
Still, the organizers plan to repeat the event later this semester and hope this smaller tournament “will get people psyched for a larger repetition later this semester.”
