Today, fed on leaderboards and YouTube clips, we know our tawdry little island in Animal Crossing, with its sad weeds and aimless paths, cannot compare to someone’s sprawling paradise of stately mansions and beach-front orchestras. But being entirely ignorant about your ability, as I was as a kid, could only have happened during a time when the internet was just background noise. Video games have always fostered competitive comparisons: they are, after all, games. It was a short time later-as my Jigglypuff was soaring through the air like a pink frisbee and I was pretending that I knew what “ wave dashing” meant-that I realized there would be no legends written about me, that on the bell curve of player skills I was stranded at the summit. I was obnoxiously confident until about one second into the first match, when my opponent's Marth began to whip back and forth, spitting white smoke up from her feet. Then I entered a modestly sized Smash Bros tournament, hosted by a boy from school. When a couple of older kids later thrashed me at an installation in GAME, a British GameStop equivalent, I was chastened, but not demoralized-shut-in prodigies, I told myself. This is it, the peak of my talents.' That was happiness then. And as these opponents-two console-less pals and my 7-year-old brother-wept and swore and were told it was time for bed, I thought, 'I'm not good at much, but I'm the best at this. On weekends and weeknights, from the smug perch of my parent's sofa, I snapped the GameCube’s little yellow C stick back and forth, and I crushed my opponents.

At the beginning of the millennium I succumbed to a wild delusion about Super Smash Bros Melee: I thought that I was good.

Super smash bros ultimate link