Early last semester, one of my floormates brought his old Nintendo 64 back to the dorm after a trip home. It came with some great old games that the entire floor remembered fondly: Mario Kart 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Snowboard Kids, and Star Fox 64, among others. While his old Nintendo seemed innocent enough at first, my floor, John Jay 5, had no idea what was in store for us.
The N64 also came with one of the greatest games ever made: Super Smash Bros. We all took to it with gusto, of course, playing that old game for hours on end like it had just been released, ignoring our work in favor of the good times that Smash, as we affectionately called it, provided.
However, my involvement in this floor-wide obsession came to an end relatively soon. I stopped playing it seriously a week or two after it arrived—I had an Xbox 360 with Halo 3 and an HDTV in my room, and I wasn’t going to waste my time on a nearly 10-year-old game. A lot of other people lost interest, too, but there was definitely a huge group of people that kept playing for a while.
That while stretched into a month—then two, then three. An entire semester passed without any sign of the game releasing the floor from the hold it had on us. I came back to play a month after we first got the game, only to find that the guys who still played had become insanely good at it, in the way that only results from playing a game for hours on end.
The signs of obsession gradually worsened. You could (and still can) walk down the hall at three in the morning and hear people playing Smash, laughing their heads off.
Things came to a head one night after some friends and I came back from hanging out one Saturday night. One guy, who shall remain nameless so that people won’t know of his insanity, suggested playing a game of Smash—but not just any game. This was to be a 100-stock game, with four players getting 100 lives, and it would not end until at least three of those players lost all of their 100 lives. There was no way they would finish this game, I thought to myself.
But they did. It took four hours, but they played it. It was the lowest point of our whole Smash affair.
I can’t divine a reason why Smash has such a hold over the guys on my floor. I mean, I know it’s fun, but is it really that fun? Guys who hadn’t played games seriously since Diablo II and the original release of Smash were suddenly enthralled by it
What’s weirder is that when I introduced a more casual game to the floor, it didn’t have the same staying power as Smash. I bought Rock Band at the beginning of this semester, because I had an amazing time with it over winter break with friends from home. I automatically assumed it would catch on with the floor—several of the guys were into Guitar Hero, and besides, Rock Band was a great social activity. It should have caught on without a problem.
But it didn’t. After a few weeks, it fizzled out, and I was left to play the guitar in my room while the Smash obsession raged on.
In an even stranger twist, it seems that the new Smash game, Brawl, hasn’t caught on either. We were all playing it for a while, but eventually everyone reverted to playing the N64 version. Why is this particular game so popular with my floor? I honestly can’t find a reason. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of playing a great game from our childhoods, or maybe the game really is that good.
Whatever the reason, my floor is a great demonstration of how video games can help bring people together. While John Jay 5 has always been an unusually close floor, Smash has definitely played a role in developing a sense of camaraderie among those who play it. Yes, the game has triggered an obsession that has been, to say the least, scary at times, but this obsession has been very positive. I can’t imagine another game that could bring together people who otherwise have no great interest in video games.