In the week leading up to March 29, students may have noticed the table in Lower Beamer decked out with a gaming setup. They may have seen the banner in Anderson Commons advertising free boba and pizza, or the posters scattered around campus advertising the chance to “smash the record.”
They may have even walked by the enthusiastic crowd gathered outside Edman Chapel on Friday, joined by a student wearing an inflatable Pikachu costume.
But was the record (not this newspaper) actually smashed?
Every year, the Wheaton College Video Game Society hosts a Super Smash Bros. tournament in which they attempt to beat the previous year’s record of the number of players. The club began as an unofficial Smash Bros. club during the pandemic, but had difficulty booking rooms to run its tournaments and eventually merged with the preexisting Esports Club to form the Wheaton Video Game Society.
Andrew Balogh, senior philosophy and biology major and president of the club, said the Video Game Society’s Smash Bros. tournaments served as his first glimpse of community at Wheaton.
“My freshman year, I came in and I didn’t really know anyone. I didn’t have much of a community, but I really liked Smash Bros,” Balogh said. A member invited Balogh to the Smash Bros. tournament, which had not been advertised to Wheaton as a whole.
“Because I was invited, I was able to go and I met the cabinet there and made really close friends along the way,” he said.
The club hosts Smash Bros. tournaments roughly once a month, with an average of 10 to 20 people showing up. For their annual record-breaking tournament, though, they sought to draw the largest crowd possible, hoping to beat the previous year’s record of 68 players. Bringing in such a large group required weeks of preparation, including campus-wide advertising.
Balogh said the previous club president excelled at advertising, which helped the club break its record for each year Balogh has been at Wheaton.
“He had us hand out flyers when people were coming out of chapel. There were tons of posters hung everywhere, as many as we could print. We would book a table and have Smash Bros. set up,” he said. “All of these are continuing legacies as well.”
Drew Moreno, a senior business economics major and Video Game Society cabinet member, was introduced to the club through Balogh and spent the past few weeks coordinating food and supplies for the event. Last year’s catering included popcorn and food from Raising Cane’s, and Moreno worked to secure boba tea from local bubble tea shop BaBam, as well as pizza.
The club has several monitors it uses during its regular events, many of which were donated in previous years. But for an event as large as the annual tournament, the club relies on loans from fellow players, which can often lead to technological glitches and issues with timing.
“I know things have started late in years past, and we do have tech issues every so often with monitors we think are working, but actually aren’t,” said Moreno. Nevertheless, it has never stopped the club from hosting the event. This year, Balogh spent a total of thirteen hours setting up, running and breaking down the event. There was a brief mixup with some of the streaming equipment, but Balogh was able to resolve the issue fairly quickly.
The tournament ran double-elimination style, in which players were eliminated if they lost two games. “It goes until there’s only two people left. One who has gone straight through the winner’s bracket, and one who has gone through the loser’s bracket,” said Moreno.
The winner was awarded bragging rights, which Moreno said are pretty legit. “People play this game so much,” he said. “You’d be surprised. There are people that have thousands of hours in this game who are playing, and it’s still fun for all skill levels.”
Though the club successfully smashed the record in the previous two years, the Video Game Society missed the mark this year by five people. They had a total of 64 in-bracket players, with an original goal of 69. Regardless, Balogh considers the event to have been very successful, and noted it featured a number of surprising upsets.
One of next year’s co-presidents, junior communication major Jamal Freeman, had an intense rivalry with another player, senior computer science major David Ramler, and was finally able to beat him at the tournament.
“Jamal had never been able to defeat David in-bracket, and then David went on to beat someone he almost never won against,” Balogh explained. “I’m really happy for Jamal because he got top eight.”
Balogh hopes the event helped foster community at Wheaton, even for those not traditionally into video games.
“When I came in, the Video Game Society was the first place I made really good friends. Just having a fun time inviting people in and maybe making some new friends along the way is what this club is all about,” he said.
Senior English writing major John Bonlender, who is Balogh’s roommate, has attended the tournament for the past three years. “Even if you don’t play video games, it’s a lot of fun to go and hang out with people and be in that space,” he said.
The club hopes to continue hosting the tournament in future years, though Balogh and Moreno believe the Video Game Society may not have the number of cabinet members required to pull it off.
“We do not have the cabinet staff going into next year to likely run an event of this size or to get anywhere near smashing the record,” said Balogh.
Balogh clarified that while the Video Game Society had every intention of beating the previous year’s number of players, it does not want to destroy the Wheaton Record.
“The record is the amount of people we have coming to the event and the amount of people we have in the bracket. Not the newspaper,” he said.
