Last weekend saw DAT Team, London’s premier Super Smash Bros. tournament organizers, host a two day, tri-game national called Albion. This event saw Smashers from all over the continent gathering in London to fight it out to claim the Albion crown. In the midst of all the hype and spectacle, we got a chance to have a brief chat to Tom Scott, lead tournament organizer for DAT Team and notable London Ike player, to talk about the UK meta, DAT Team’s growth and the general state of UK Smash.
Sam “Trilby” Foxall: First off, how do you feel about DAT Team’s growth in the past year?
Tom Scott: To be honest, we didn’t really exist a year ago. Well, we kind of did. How DAT formed was literally a case of me running tournaments by myself at the Heart of Gaming with ‘Dat Smash,’ with them going pretty badly as I was running them by myself. So, Ben and Eve (two other integral DAT Team members) came up to me and said ‘we’re helping you now.’
SF: I remember being at DS6 and it not running as smoothly as planned.
TS: It wasn’t ideal. The venue wasn’t the best place to run things. The people of Heart of Gaming are cool, but the venue was suited for around 60 people and we were having 80 or 90 people turn up, along with other people playing arcade games at the venue.
SF: What are DAT Team’s plans going forward for the next 6-12 months?
TS: The first non-professional plan is to finish uni and actually do what I need to do in that regard outside of Smash. After that, I’m not sure at the moment. We’ll probably have a sit down and have a meeting to say what we need to do as a team. The rest of the team isn’t that interested but personally, I want to start running more Melee events as I know a lot of the Melee community and they are really cool guys.
SF: That’s actually something I want to ask, with Albion being a tri-game national, do you think this tournament is a step forward for UK Smash unity?
TS: I’m not going to say just yet, but I feel that it’s a start because we haven’t had a dedicated Melee and Smash 4 event in the UK for so long. It’s really kind of sad that it hasn’t happened until now because both scenes are cool. Maybe in another 6 months or so we’ll do another Albion, but I’m keen to stick to October rather than May. May is packed full of things with exams and other events so we’ll steer away from that, but we do want to do more events like Albion in the future.
SF: How about with Dat Blast Zone?
TS: DBZ will stick to being just Smash 4 as that’s when the Smash 4 community is dedicated to doing their stuff, but I might start doing dedicated Melee tournaments as the alternative. With Albion 2, we may try for a Nintendo sponsorship.
SF: Did you approach Nintendo at all in regards to Albion?
TS: We spoke to the UK community manager, but there was the big issue of Project M being here. I always wanted to do a Project M tournament as PM still has a very active scene here and I wanted to make sure they had some representation but next time, we may leave PM out. As much as we want all 3 games here, a Nintendo sponsorship is very hard to pass up. That’s the main thing for growth of DAT Team, really.
SF: How do you think the UK stands up compared to the rest of the European scene in both streaming events and general player skill?
TS: In terms of streaming, we are only second to GeekyGoonSquad for stream quality. There are some kinks we do need to work out, especially scheduling games for the DAT Team streams as at the moment, it’s very much ‘this game looks good, we’ll get you two on stream now.’ We’re going to start really planning out our programming so we know this game is on next, then this game and so on. That’s for Smash 4. Melee unfortunately doesn’t have that much actual streaming in the UK. I know the Midlands has some tournament streams occasionally, but there really isn’t much else out there which is a shame. I really want to start hosting Melee to boost streaming for them, but I’ll need to get a separate streamer for that I think.
As for player skill, that’s a super difficult question. It’s kind of the same for both scenes, the UK only really has one player. Well, actually, we’ve got two. For Melee, it’s Professor Pro and Fuzzyness, with Ixis and J Miller being our two major talents for Smash 4. We really struggle on a global scale because we’ve got these top players then there is this enormous gap until you reach everyone else.
SF: Well that’s my next question, what can the UK do to improve?
TS: That’s really hard. First off for Smash 4, the best player in the UK in my opinion just doesn’t enter tournaments. KillerJawz has such an understanding of the game that every time I talk to him, I come out a better player. People need to talk to him and get some tips from him as he is the best. We say at DAT Team events that KillerJawz is here, he will help you improve at the game. He won’t just help you improve by telling you how to beat this player, he will help you get good at understanding Smash 4 as a whole. His mechanical and technical knowledge is pretty much perfect so players just need to talk to him. For Melee, I’ve been out of the scene for a long time so I can’t really say what the UK has to do there.
SF: For Smash 4, do you think there is anything that typifies the UK meta that makes it different to Europe or the US?
TS: We’re very untechnical. The rest of Europe is very aggressive and technical when it comes to how they play while the UK just isn’t. Besides Ixis who is very technical with his Sonic, the UK is very neutral heavy and we avoid the flashy aggressive stuff because we lose neutral. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s bad. The best example would be to look at Khanage, our best Peach compared to someone like EOE or Meru. His technical knowledge is lacking, but his fundamentals are solid, which is pretty typical of the UK.
For any more information on DAT Team, you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook for the latest information on any tournaments in the London area and make sure to tune in to twitch.tv/datteamlive every Monday night for their regular Monday Meltdown tournament stream.