Evo 2016: Smash Bros Melee Finals were a dream…land
Teeing up the final event of the night, Super Smash Bros Melee kept the pace up and running at Evo 2016.
If there was ever a doubt why a game more than a decade old like Super Smash Bros Melee was at Evo 2016 on the main stage, right before Street Fighter V caps off the night, the actual Top 8 Finals play spoke for itself. Plenty of times we saw Peach, Fox, Sheik, Falco, Marth and even Captain Falcon show hundreds of thousands of people live in-stadium and at home just exactly what Melee is all about.
Those who are entrenched in the Super Smash Bros Melee scene will have seen the Grand Finals match-up once or twice (or even close to a dozen times). Adam “Armada” Lindgren and Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma faced off once more, coming into the Top 8 Finals both on the Winners Bracket. This would be HungryBox’s third-straight Evo Melee Finals, meaning he truly needed a victory to avoid being labeled the DiCaprio of his medium.
HungryBox came out of the set with a 2-0 lead, showing a strong Jigglypuff on all aspects of play. The rest reads were perfect, the punishments were well-timed and he played his game instead of Armada’s Fox game. Armada stayed patient, winning the next two games and had a two-stock lead in the fifth game. HungryBox stayed tough and ended Armada with a rest, resetting the brackets and keeping the Super Smash Bros Melee hype going.
Unfortunately for Armada, the matchup stats and the dropped reads from HungryBox early in the second set were not enough, as the penultimate Evo 2016 tournament reached a fifth and decisive game on the reset bracket. Reaching the final stock for each competitor, HungryBox reversed his fate from last year to become the Super Smash Bros Melee champion over Armada.
Concurrent viewership for Super Smash Bros Melee peaked at just over 219,400 on the main Twitch channel; a gigantic jump in viewership than in what we’ve seen from Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator, Marvel vs Capcom 3, andMortal Kombat XL Finals.
Here are the Top 8 final results for Super Smash Bros Melee play at Evo 2016.
- Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma
- Adam “Armada” Lindgren
- Justin “Plup” Mcgrath
- Joseph “Mang0” Marquez
- Jason “Mew2king” Zimmerman
- (T-5) Johnny “s2j” Kim
- Kevin “PewPewU” Toy
- (T-7) Weston “Westballz” Dennis
There’s just one more event left; Street Fighter V. Being broadcast live on both Twitch and ESPN 2, the fighting game community’s (probably) biggest moment ever will be coming to you live from the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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