Xanadu Origins is the largest and most stacked non-SSC tournament in over four years. It is a fitting time and place for an event of this caliber. Dating back to 2014, Xanadu Games was the first place to hold organized and streamed Super Smash Bros. 64 weeklies. The events featured notable names such as Shears, Darkhorse, Nintendude, BarkSanchez, LD, and even SuPeRbOoMfAn traveling from Canada to attend. The success of these weeklies ultimately led to the Super Smash Bros. 64 scene ascending to new heights from 2016-2019.
One of the most interesting storylines going into Xanadu Origins is the return to console competition for SuPeRbOoMfAn after a nearly 4 year hiatus from competing. In 2019 Boom only lost 10 tournament games to North American players and won 18 tournaments in a row before his retirement after Super Smash Con 2019. In February 2023, he announced via twitter that he would be returning to console competition and wanted twitter to choose his character. In a close call, Fox won the poll.
This leads us to ask: can Boom win using only Fox at Xanadu Origins? He showed his ability to play the character at a top level winning Lowww’s online monthly with Fox over other top players. Xanadu is a bit of a safe haven for Fox though, with LD, a well known solo fox main, winning most of the weeklies and Boom himself playing Fox back in 2016 at Smash at Xanadu 134. But, as the saying goes “Fox is Fox.”
Other notable entrants for Xanadu Origins include high caliber ranked players baby caweb, Dogs_Johnson, Hero Pie, Josh Brody, Joshi, KD3, KeroKeroppi, Lowww, Shihman, Zero, and many many others. In fact, over half the 70+ entrants are ranked or have been previously ranked in the 64 League Rankings or the SSB64 UPR. Joshi and Chars are even traveling up from Peru to attend and showcase their skills.
Spots for top 8 are incredibly contentious and some questions remain as to who will take those spots. Will the Apex 2022 winner KD3 make up for his shortcomings at Keystoned VI? Will Hammerheart (“tod”, Victor Bictor, Power Steering Fluid Drinker) continue his dominant streak? The west coast is throwing their own wrenches into people’s top 8 predictions with Hero Pie, a player who hasn’t entered an east coast major in years, and Shihman, the Falcon/Yoshi dual main who secured a top 8 spot at SSC22 that included a victory over tournament favorite by some of the community: KeroKeroppi. Speaking of KeroKeroppi, his relatively disappointing results in 2021-2022 have driven him to focus more on vanilla over remix. Will this be enough to catapult him to a victory at Xanadu? B33F is a high caliber player who recently upset KD3 at Keystoned VI, could we see a repeat performance from him while making some high quality upsets? The international presence will make reaching top 16, let alone top 8, even more difficult with Peruvian heavy-hitters Joshi and Chars.
If Boom’s Fox does not take the tournament, any of the players listed above could. I predict many upsets and some surprise performances from other players such as Andykins (aka Andross, A Solid Fox Main, Altykins), etab, Paco, and the Japanese 2023 Kanto Tournament Amateur Bracket winner Shears. Another player to watch out for is Waxy:Joe — a player fresh off a 3rd place finish at Rochester’s Frame 12. Could the solo Jigglypuff main use this momentum to propel himself to a top 8 finish?
Excitingly there are too many players to name who can make surprises at this event and we will see our questions answered in just a few days on May 6th.
Of course none of this would have been possible without the colossal effort of tournament organizer Darkhorse. His ambitions are high for this tournament with the intention to record every set and have 3 total streams for the event, including one of them holding a quad stream. I sent Darkhorse some interview questions in regards to Xanadu Origins and the history of the venue. Much of which was previously outlined in a series of tweets in February:
The History of Baltimore Smash 64: A Xanadu Origins Story
Darkhorse: “In April of 1999, myself and Josh Brody were in middle school and got Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64. We played a ton up until Melee came out. I mained Samus. He mained Pikachu.
In 2004 I left for college. Not wanting to deprive my younger brothers of their Gamecube, I took the N64 with me. In my dorm I pwned everyone in free-for-alls with items etc. One day, a friend of a dorm-mate came through and destroyed me with his Kirby. He could Z-cancel. I searched and found old netplay videos on YouTube. Isai, Mariguas, and others showed me what was possible. I practiced and eventually was able to beat this new challenger. I actually reconnected with this guy (Asaf) last year and we played a few games.
In 2005 I decided to host a tournament on campus. Facebook had just launched for colleges so no organization there. I made flyers and posted them around campus. Tourney day came and Asaf and I met in grand finals. He won a close match vs my Yoshi on Hyrule.
In 2007 I hosted another tournament, this time at my off-campus house. 2 local melee players showed up that knew how to pivot and do Falcon standards. One of them was Wenbobular, a Xanadu regular eventually. My eyes had been opened once again
In 2008 I hosted another tournament at my house. This time it was a teams-only event and we posted on smashboards. Not 100% sure, but I think Josh and I ended up losing to dmoogle/A$ and someone else we can’t remember
In 2013 I’m living in Baltimore. Libby comes home and tells me, “They’re playing that game you play at Golden West (a bar).” I walk over and it’s a 4-player timed FFA tournament. I try to troll and go DK. We get Zebes as the stage and I end up losing to Teflon Ron. Ron then tells me about a weekly tournament (Warfare Wednesday) at another bar in the city (Sticky Rice) I check out WW and discover that Ron had been farming them for months and is known as “the Smash King.” I beat him and am crowned the new champ
Over the course of the next year-ish I convince Josh to come up to some weeklies and we play a bunch together. He improves to a similar level as myself and we basically farm that weekly. There were always 3 other games at WW so it was a fun night every week.
Eventually Josh moved in with us and we played more. We continued to go to the weeklies. In the Summer of 2014 one of the WW hosts reads us a Craigslist ad he found. The gist of it was: I am better than you in SSB64. No one can beat me. You can pick any character you want but I get blue-hat Pikachu. You can have ugly green-hat Pikachu. If you beat me I will give you $20. If I beat you it’s fine. You won’t owe anything
Ron ends up replying and meeting up with the new challenger. He reports back that he lost but the new guy will come to the bar next WW. New guy shows up, plays Josh and narrowly beats him. I proceed to beat him with Falcon, Puff, and almost DK. This guy was David Shears.
Surprised with how good we were, Shears tells us about the competitive community and that he knows someone named Nintendude that can help out with a more organized and competitive weekly event. He also knows an online player named LD that lives in the city and in October 2014 we have our very first weekly tournament at the old Xanadu Games.”
Dr. Sauce: Why is Xanadu important for the history of competitive 64?
Darkhorse: The importance in my opinion comes from the fact that it was really the first organized, streamed 64 weekly. The occasional presence on VGBC main stream was nice but I’m not sure how much it actually did for us. The main thing was just exposing the 64 community to something organized. It helped that we were in an area with some decent players like Nintendude, LD, and Clubba(dubba) so people had more exciting stuff to watch.
This was also the beginning of Shears as an organizer. Gaining respect as an organizer allowed him to try stuff out and also move into organizing events on a national scale. Some people might say the most significant thing to come out of the Xanadu scene is just us as “community leaders” and organizers
Dr. Sauce: When was the decision made to have this event and why?
Darkhorse: In June 2022 the idea was floated internally with VGBC staff and we were targeting an SSC announcement with the event being in October, but it just fell through the cracks. The idea was to have an event celebrating the beginning of Smash and the beginning of Smash weeklies at Xanadu (they did start with Brawl). They have approached me over the years about trying to do a 64 event and I kind of always shot it down because this community is very tough to motivate when it comes to events and I knew VGBC wouldn’t want to dump money into flying top international players out etc. and that’s kind of what it takes to break out into that national major level of events for us.
Not that there’s anything wrong with us just running a MDVA/PA/NJ regional but I just wasn’t interested in organizing that kind of event. In December 2022 I wanted to run an MVP/MOMs – style event with MDVA Vs. PA with 64, Melee, and Ultimate but I couldn’t get the melee and ult crews to agree on a weekend so that got scrapped in January. At that point I was kind of motivated and had the itch to run something so I went back and brought this up with Matt Lofton (Aposl) and started looking at our event calendar. They had the whole Xanadu 500 series happening throughout April but there wasn’t a good spot there for us and I wanted a little more time to plan so we saw May 6th was open and locked it in.
Dr. Sauce: If all goes well do you think you’ll host a Xanadu Origins 2?
Darkhorse: Almost 0% chance. This was a colossal personal effort by me and I don’t think the next iteration would be any easier. Out of every player registered for 64 I personally DM’d and talked to all but like 3 of them about attending. In total I probably hit up about 100 people. Also I’m sure you noticed I would just insert it into conversations wherever I could. Twitter, Discord servers, FB, Twitch, etc. It certainly helped get people talking about it but that kind of effort from one person is not reasonable or sustainable and I won’t be doing it again. But yeah, between not wanting to do all that work again (without any guarantee it would be successful) and everything else I’ll have going on next year (I’m having a kid in like 6 weeks) I don’t see it happening.
That being said, if someone else took over I’m sure there could be XO2. Maybe instead I team back up with Shears and we do Let’s Go 2…who knows..
Dr. Sauce: Any surprises in store for competitors or viewers?
Darkhorse: Wouldn’t be a surprise then, would it?
Dr. Sauce: Anything else you want to add?
Darkhorse: Can’t think of much. I’m excited to see how this whole plan to record every set goes. It’s pretty ambitious and I’m definitely running out of time to get everything tested to my level of satisfaction but hopefully it works out. That and getting a quad stream set up are things I really hope work out because I’m planning to do that for SSC as well.
May 6, 2023 is a huge day for Super Smash Bros. 64 in celebrating the history of where the modern competitive scene started. It is also a launching point reaching new heights for the scene as a whole. The tournament will be interesting and entertaining for competitors and viewers alike.
You can catch Xanadu Origins live streaming Saturday, May 6 2023
Main Stream: VGBootcamp
Side Stream: 64 League
Quad Side Stream: Darkhorse
Follow Along with all the action at https://www.start.gg/tournament/xanadu-origins/details
Special thanks to Darkhorse and Dogs_Johnson for their help and input on this article