I recently told this story to a couple of people and thought I should post it here since they loved it and it's pretty cool.

I’m a Smash Bros fan and I love going to Big House every year as a spectator. I’m not a very competitive player, so I just go to watch and support my favorite players. In 2015, it was my second time there and it was much larger than 2014. 2015 had over 2000 Smash players enter events, lots of stuff for sale, artists, sponsors, almost $40K in prize money; just a much bigger event. One of the vendor desks in 2015 was for a charity called Gamers Outreach. They bring video game consoles on mobile carts to hospitals for kids.

Anyway, we had literally just arrived after a few hours of driving for finals day (Sunday), and it was earlier in the day, so not many people were around yet. My roommate spotted a Kart 64 setup right away and pointed me in the direction of the Gamers Outreach desk. I started talking to the guys and asked about Kart, and they said that there was a charity competition going on. The best time for the weekend would win. At this point, I didn’t care what there was to win (if there even was a prize) I just wanted to play some Kart and see how good all the Smash players were. It was $5 per attempt, or $20 for five attempts. I bought five. Unfortunately, they were using an HDTV so I knew there would be lag and asked to have a minute to get used to it, which they were nice enough to give me a free lap. At the time, I hadn’t been playing much Kart, so I felt that I’d be pretty rusty. And…I was pretty bad on my warm-up run. It was a combination of being rusty and significant lag from the TV, which was two strikes already.

The course of choice was Mario Raceway and they were going for a flap time. I had watched the guy running the desk play for a minute and the time on the system was 27”01. I was pretty sure that no matter how rusty or how much lag there was, I could hit a faster time than 27”01, and I got a 26”80 on my first try. I was even bold enough to go for the gap between the wall and the big mushroom, which was risky to me because I had spent actual money on this and didn’t want to look like a fool by messing it up. And they did not allow a retry!

The guys working the desk went nuts! I had set the record for the weekend in one try and also was the only person to successfully hit the gap. And I still had four more tries. I beat my record on run 2. And again on run 3, where I drove a low 25. On run 4, I hit a 24”75. The guys at the desk were shocked because going sub-30 had been considered top-level for them, and they didn’t think anyone would even be able to break that 27 barrier. I messed up my 5th attempt, though LOL It was at this point that I realized there was something to win because they kept saying the words “DX Racer” over and over and I was like WTF is a DX Racer? It was brand new and in the box still, so it wasn’t assembled and someone had to Google it for me. Their grand prize was a $300 top of the line gaming chair. Which was pretty nice because my chair at the time was an ancient, unpadded rocking chair.

I kept checking back over and over throughout the day to see if anyone had gotten close to my time. The guy who had the 27”01 came back a few times, but the best he could do was around 26”90. So in the end, we had to cram this huge box into the backseat of my friend’s car and I got a $300 gaming chair.

It's actually because of this random event that I started working on my PRs again in 2016. Between the time that this tournament took place, and the end of 2016, I managed to improve my rank by about 130 spots on the ladder, and I'm so happy with that because I thought I had peaked. It's kind of cool how a random event can get you back into the Kart seat after a bit of a hiatus.

That's a cool story. I've won a handful of things related to MK competitions.

Back before MKDD was released I went to E3 in 2003 and they had some beta versions of the game that you could play. You had to wait in a line and then you sat in these chair with 3-5 other people in their chairs and raced 1 of 3 tracks. The winner got an MKDD shirt and occasionally a GBA carrying case. I think I won about 5-6 times (every time I tried) and got a bunch of shirts and 1 GBA carrying case. The game was weird because you couldn't do any MTs (just sliding) and the tracks were slightly different from the final version. I did actually attempt the DK Mountain crack jump and hit it successfully on like my 3rd or 4th race (so I may have been the first person ever to do that).

Also, when MKDD was first released, a local videogame store had a competition to see who could set the fastest time on Rainbow Road. The game had already been released for a few days and I had already been grinding on it, so I won by like 5 seconds. I ended up winning another copy of MKDD which I traded for Mario Party 5.

Occasionally I see these local (but not near me) MK64 tournaments (like the one in Seattle that Sully went to) where they have these big turnouts and $ for the winner and literally drool at the idea of being able to attend something like that. I will occasionally check online for MK64 tournaments around me but I haven't really been too lucky in finding anything. I did win an MK64 and an MK8 tournament at Twin Galaxies Live, but those were fairly small tournaments and the competition was pretty much nothing. Even for MK8 when it just came out and people were interested in it, I won pretty much going away.

That's sick, those chairs are no pluckin around. It's pretty cool that that specific event led to your return to the leaderboards. I wish I could find some local tourneys near me.. here in Buffalo it would prolly be at a bar. that would be easy to clean up on, but i def dont see any chance of a sick prize like that anywhere near my hometown haha. When is the next Big House anyways?

Jonesy wrote on 07/07/17 at 07:20:50:


Good memories of E3 2003, Mark. So wild to remember us meeting each other by finally competing against someone who seemed pretty good at the game  . I actually have a video of myself hitting the DK Mountain crack jump 3/3 while we were at the conference. Enjoy:

https://youtu.be/ffTQXojHsfQ?t=19m27s