End of Melee Coinbox

Today (November 14th, 2023) will be the last ever iteration of the Super Smash Bros. Melee version of the legendary online biweekly tournament Coinbox due to sudden and dramatic changes in Nintendo's community tournament regulations which make it impossible to host an online tournament due to Nintendo's strong, and now enforced, anti-mod and anti-third party software policies (mods and software Melee requires for adequate netplay).

Attending the tournament will be Hungrybox, the creator of the original 'Juicebox' tournament that would later be sponsored by Coinbase, as well as being one of the five 'Melee gods' that dominated top-level play from 2008-2018, fellow god Mango, #1 player Zain (who had announced his retirement a week before), de facto #1 Cody Schwab, Hax$, Jmook, Ginger, Wizzrobe, S2J, Salt, n0ne, Spark, Axe, Eddy Mexico, as well as old-school greats such as Lucky, Chillin, Weztballz (yes, really) ChuDat, Kage (Kah-gay), and Gahtzu.

Hungrybox's initial response to Nintendo's new guidelines was an impassioned and determined monologue about how he would continue to run the tournament. Not twenty-four hours later, Hbox had to do some damage control, announcing the final Melee coinbox with visible and audible emotional pain.

All of North America's best players (sans Plup) are attending to see Coinbox off as they compete for the now-doubled 6,000 dollar prize pot, as this possibly begins the end of the Melee scene.

tl;dr Super Smash Bros. Melee online tournament is going away because Nintendo hates people having fun.

It ain't anything new either: Nintendo has always been hostile towards the Smash community, especially the Smash modding community.

Ever heard of Project M? Brawl+? Brawl-? No? There's a reason for that.

Hopefully this situation will resolve just like EVO 2013 did. Hopefully.

Instead, if you ever want to run a tournament, you have to grab GameCubes and Wii's that have long gone off the shelves if you don't want a BYOS situation going on.