The clicks and clacks of GameCube controllers normally fill the apartment of Ishtvan Erdelyi during one of his Super Smash Bros. Melee bootcamp sessions. The two players duking it out on the 18-year-old platform fighter normally don’t speak, but sometimes the sound of intelligent dance music or classical piano ballads from Bach plays from Erdelyi's bluetooth speaker.
If he is one of those players fighting for supremacy on the screen, he has probably dismantled his opponent before the eight minute timer is up.
Erdelyi, called Isti by his friends, is a fixture in the Bloomington Melee community.
He’s known for his training sessions organized at his apartment and for being one of the top players in the IU scene. Now a senior at IU, he not only tutors math but also Melee to players who are willing to come over and train.
“If you go over to his house, it’s just Melee for hours and hours,” IU senior Robert Iannuzzo said.
Erdelyi started these sessions, dubbed “isti bootcamp” to educate other players and practice himself. He invited players in the IU community over to his apartment in the summer of 2018, usually over Facebook or at the local IU tournaments.
During the school year, these sessions last about four hours. But during breaks in the semester, there are times where seven hours pass with only pauses to eat, drink or talk about the game.
Josep Han, a senior at IU and another frequent bootcamper, said one time they stopped during a session to drink coffee at 3 a.m. to help stay awake.
“It’s just a period of time where we just become degenerates and play Melee till dawn,” Han said.
While this marathon of gaming might seem garish to some, it’s not only conducive for learning the game but also acts as a mock tournament for the players. At big regional tournaments players can play for 12 hours, sleep, then come back for another 12- hour day of competition.
But just because Erdelyi wants to teach, it doesn’t mean he’ll take it easy on his opponents. He regularly defeats bootcampers with three or four lives left to spare. In Melee, you have four to begin with.
“It’s demoralizing sometimes,” said Han.
While fighting and losing against Erdelyi, Iannuzzo said he will sometimes smack his hands against his legs and shakes his head while calling himself stupid.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been destroyed like that when I was trying before in my life,” Iannuzzo said. “This is what it takes to get better.”
Erdelyi played Melee with his brother growing up but only started taking the game seriously in 2015. He entered his first tournament in 2015 at a local area network center, a complex with computers or consoles connected directly to each other to mitigate the delay of a wireless internet connection, in Noblesville, Indiana.
Before Melee caught his attention, Erdelyi played Halo competitively for five years. He started with an eye toward competition on the third installment of the space shooter but quit the game in 2012.
“I’m not a super gamer,” Erdelyi said. “I only play one competitive game at a time, and now it's Melee.”
Han and Iannuzzo both started on their fighting game journey with Project M, a modified version of the third installment of Smash that made the in-game movement more akin to Melee. Once tournament organizers stopped running the game, the duo had to switch to Melee.
Melee is notoriously tough for new players, with the technical aspects being the first barrier of entry. For reference, the best character in the game, Fox, an anthropomorphic fox and space pilot, can break six inputs a second.
That’s six buttons pressed, a flick of c-stick on the GameCube controller, or a direction input on the control stick in a second.
The second barrier is the amount of history.
Melee is old enough to be drafted into the military and was treated as a competitive game almost since its launch on Nov. 21, 2001.
Coming into a tournament after only playing against the computer or your older sibling, people find out very quickly how much they don’t know. Most flame out early in the double elimination format tournaments not having won a single game.
“Literally everyone ever when they go to their first tournament they get 0-2ed and just get destroyed,” Iannuzzo said. “Everyone ever.”
This can be discouraging to newer players and often causes them to quit the game. This is what Han was experiencing his sophomore year after not getting the results he wanted in the IU scene.
Han was starting to give up on the game before he was invited by Erdelyi to a bootcamp session. When the offer was extended, he thought Eredlyi was joking.
“I was just a teeny guy that barely broke top 20 while he was top two,” Han said.
Han still plays Melee and attends local IU tournaments while traveling to bigger events in Illinois with Erdelyi.
“I was really lucky to meet a person like him,” Han said.
Erdelyi is still a student of the game and sees the time he takes to talk to his sparring opponents helpful to his play.
He also frequents Smashboards, a discussion forum for Smash that has been around since 2000. He discusses the game with players that also use his character, a sword-wielding fighter with blue hair named Marth, as well as the now-retired professional Melee player Kevin “PPMD” Nanney.
“PPMD is secretly public access,” said Erdelyi.
PPMD runs two Smashboard threads, one for discussion about Marth and his other main character Falco, an anthropomorphic bird that is a part of Fox’s crew. The former pro has critiqued Erdelyi’s matches before over his stream on Twitch.tv and given him feedback on how to improve his gameplay in certain situations.
“You can basically write him a five-page essay, which I do about some Melee ideas,” Erdelyi said. “And then he’ll respond back with another five-page essay.”
While Erdelyi may be a level above the players he has mentored, there is still a level above him that can beat him just as soundly as he does to them. And then there's another level above that.
“The game never ends, the better you get the more it opens up stuff about it,” Erdelyi said. “Melee’s beauty doesn’t really reveal itself until you put some effort in and look for it.”
