Combo NFTs from Smash Melee (and later every game)
Stage 1: Ideation 10 NEAR
Super Smash Brothers Melee is a 2001 crossover fighting video game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the GameCube.
High-level gameplay can be beautiful and has been likened to music playing. Combos, in-game sequences, and even full game replays are things of beauty that people like to preserve and admire. And own? I propose to build a simple interface for cropping replays, minting NFTs of those clips, and visualize them as webms or gifs. I call them “combo NFTs”.
Melee has a 20 year-long history, a thriving competitive scene, and a passionate community of players AND makers. One of the most iconic moments in gaming history is the wombo combo (13yo video with 18M views), an exciting segment of a melee teams match that spawned countless memes.
After being neglected by Nintendo, the community has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, organized thousands of independent tournaments, and even gained a new life during the pandemic as Project Slippi modded the game to allow netplay with a superior netcode to that provided by Nintendo.
In 2020, Project Slippi, a mod for Melee designed to introduce quality-of-life features such as replays and online play, was updated to support rollback netcode and integrated matchmaking, allowing netplay across large distances with little latency. In the same year, an e-sports competition known as “The Big House” was sent a cease and desist by Nintendo, due to the usage of this mod.
Project Slippi is widely used and saves game replays as a series of inputs and game events, making for lightweight files that can be replayed using a copy of the game. These files are perfect for minting NFTs of, as - being sequences of inputs and events - they’re more semantically meaningful than videos of the game. My plan is to figure out how to mint and visualize this file format as easily as possible with help from mintbase, and then build an interface to make it effortless.
The melee community is intense but still small when compared to big titles like Fortnite and League. It would be significant for pro players to be able to mint their best combos from tournament matches and sell them to the community for financial support. I’m choosing Melee as the flagship game for this project due to the convenience of the replay file format, and the punk ethos and decentralized nature of this grassroots gaming community without a mother company.
This concept can be later expanded to any game with interpretable replay files like Dota 2, League of Legends.
Stage 2: Pitch Deck 20 NEAR
Flesh out historical and technological context, implementation details, present mockups.
Stage 3. Demo 30 NEAR
Video of a prototype minting an actual NFT from a .slp replay file.
Stage 4. Github Repo - 40 NEAR
Repository with the prototype code ready for further contribution.
NEAR account: exgenesis.near