The Shape of Melee to Come (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BOXX)

by Holden “Holden” Predmore (@holden_pnw)

The Frame1, a new box-style Melee controller, sold out its first wave of preorders recently. While the preorders had been coming in consistently for a while, this was an unforeseen event.

“I was expecting somewhere around a 50/50, 60/40 split for preorders and backorders,” Stephen “Greg Turbo” Kasmir, the founder and designer of the Frame1 said. “We were on track for that until Crane and Leffen made their videos on it, then we just sold out instantly.”

Alternative Melee controllers have been on the rise generally for the last few years, but the current growth seen in the last year or so has been outstanding.

Not only are new projects like the Frame1 seeing unparalleled early success for such a grassroots product, but also the box-style controllers already out in the wild have been making a name for themselves.

It’s anecdotal, but I feel like everytime I watch another EU Slippi tournament I find out about a new player over there that plays on B0XX. Pipsqueak, a Swedish B0XX player, recently won a tournament over Leffen, who was playing on a review copy of the upcoming Frame1.

That’s not to mention the continued success of Hax$ (when he decides to enter a netplay tournament) and the many up-and-coming N.A. box-style players that I know I would miss way too many of to try and list without embarrassing myself.

However, like with anything that gets popular enough, box-style controllers have attracted their share of controversy and strong opinions in the Melee community.

Official Melee Top 100 players and prominent personalities, such as Leffen, iBDW, and Anees “Free Palestine” Assaf have all weighed in on the box-style controller discussion happening on Melee Twitter.

“[Melee Twitter uses] the box-style controller to build their arguments for why certain things should be certain ways on the GameCube controller,” Free Palestine told me.

“You’re going to see a lot of people throw digital controllers under the bus,” Greg Turbo said. “We go over the same talking points over and over again with no progress.”

Ultimately, it cannot be denied that box-style controllers will impact the Melee scene. The question becomes, what is that impact going to look like?

I decided to ask someone who is an expert on Melee iconography, AJ “spoopy” Rappaport, the author of Melee is Broken.

“The box-style controller presents a lot of opportunities in terms of accessibility for differently able-bodied people,” spoopy said. “It can be a lot easier to press a flat button than grip a GameCube controller.”

Melee is a game that has survived for almost 20 years now with no large changes to the core hardware. The biggest change made to the core game widely accepted by the community is U.C.F., software that has basically no impact outside of making the hardware we still had to use more consistent.

So what happens when new hardware challenges one of Melee’s most iconic physical icons? Probably not much.

“If we feel attached to a certain hardware, we’re going to stop at nothing to keep it alive,” spoopy said. “The GameCube controller… It’s iconic.”

As for top-level Melee, no one I spoke to seemed very worried about any potential meta impacts an influx of rectangles could have.

“If someone beat me in melee, it doesn’t matter what they beat me with. They’re beating me in the game,” Free Palestine said. “It’s not absurdly busted or anything.”

It is fun to speculate about the future impact of new Melee technology, considering how much more is happening in that field than ever before.

“We’re going to have to wait and see with the Panda controller,” Greg Turbo said. “It’s hard to say until we have all the players on the field.”

After all the interviews, they all seemed to arrive at a consensus: Melee is still a growing game. In the last few months, the developments in controllers designed for Melee have pushed the envelope further than all of the other hardware advances made before 2017, when the biggest controller mods were notches or removing springs from the triggers.

During my time researching and doing interviews to write what I felt was an informed opinion on the topic, I kept coming back to the idea of growing pains. Melee just hit a growth spurt for controllers, and we’re still getting used to all the shiny new things.

However, if we’ve learned one thing for Melee’s history it’s that no matter what our controllers look like another 20 years from now, we’ll still be here, playing the same children’s party game.