Unpublished interview with Tom ‘GP’ Scott, head of DAT Team, Smash 4 TO team based in London. Organisation runs Albion, DBZ and Meltdown: the main major, monthly and weekly Smash tournament series in London.

CH: Thanks for talking to me GP. For the last 3 years, if you mention Smash 4 TOs in the UK or even Europe as a whole, your name is immediately mentioned. Can you give me a brief history of your time as a Smash player, pre and post Smash 4 player, and how DAT Team came into being, how we got to the point of creating this team.

GP: So I’ve been around for ages. My very first tournament was Jan 30^th 2010, a very long time ago now. I found the Brawl scene through All is Brawl, and through Willz. He gave an event link to a friend of mine, just happened to see it, went along and it just went from there. I was playing Smash for nearly a year before I realised there were actual London and UK events. I guess a large part of why I started running stuff was to grow the scene, get people to join the community without having to look around too much. So yeah, that’s how that got started.

DAT got started originally because I was a real stubborn man! I was initially running events on my own in London, and they weren’t the worst events, but they weren’t great, I was basically spreading myself too thin. Eventually, Eve and DX17 came to me and said, “we’re helping you today, you don’t have a choice”, the events got better, and I guess it went from there.

Yeah, I got the feeling from your TwitLonger that DAT Team has always tried to bring a grassroots approach to the events it runs, and I guess that shows in the origins you mention there. Can you tell me a little more about that and your philosophy when it comes to running events?

I mean when it comes to running events I could literally write pages and pages on this topic! The most important thing is to do what you said you’re going to do with the event. I think this might be a little weird, but when you see events do the reverse of this it makes a lot more sense. I would far prefer to promise less for an event and then be able to provide more on the day because we had extra time, rather than promise loads of stuff that we aren’t able to do because we run out of time. This is a particular philosophy that a lot of Europe struggles with, particularly when it comes to events like crew battles. It leaves a far sourer taste in an attendee’s mouth if they don’t get something that they’ve been promised. It’s an important thing to do what you said you were going to do, and I don’t think this is something a lot of people subscribe to, you see loads of events that kind of score a black mark because they have to cancel something because they ran out of time.

In the same vein, it’s important to run stuff on time. It sounds basic and simple, but there’s an expression, ‘Tournament Standard Time’, and it refers to running several hours late. The fact that this is a ‘standard’ for most tournaments is unacceptable in my opinion. You put out a schedule and you follow it to the letter; if you can’t stick to a schedule, you change the schedule. Unless something extraordinary happens, like Ixis camping people out in Grands to game 10 every tournament, DAT events always finish on time or early. I think this is way more important than a lot of people make it out to be.

So essentially, it’s about professionalism. Running on time, sticking to the event schedule…

Yeah. The way I see it, whilst Smash is still grassroots to a degree because of a lack of company support, for Smash 4 or Melee really, it’s all done by the community, but at the end of the day as a TO people are paying you to provide a service; if you aren’t providing what people are paying you for, what are you doing? Not to target anyone specifically, but people don’t understand just how much work has to go into TO-ing an event. I’ve personally helped just about every TO in the UK in some way, shape or form, and so many of them think it’s going to run itself, and it just doesn’t work like that. Events end up being run poorly because people aren’t willing to put the work in to make an event really good. It’s my biggest pet peeve with events: most of the time I don’t get to enter events because I spend so much time running them, so when I do get to an event and it’s bad, it’s a real let-down for me.

That’s understandable. So, like most people, you were a competitor before you were a TO, but you were TOing in the big transition period for ‘new-gen’ Smash, between Melee/Brawl/PM and Smash 4, which had a large combination of veterans and new starters coming together to form a new community. As a TO, what was that transition like, and did you face any difficulties in trying to bring together old and new communities?

I’ve been running events for just over 7 years, and this is a topic I think I’ve got quite a strange stance on, and I don’t normally speak to people about this very often. I don’t actually consider the Melee scene a part of our Smash 4 scene. We’ll run events together, especially on a local scale like weeklies or smaller regionals, but at this point I feel the scenes are ran exclusively from each other. Back in the Brawl days we ran together out of necessity because both scenes were much smaller, but now each community has expanded to the point where we don’t need each other, and I think it’s detrimental when we run events together once you get past a certain size. I don’t really consider the two scenes as one entity. The key difference is that Melee players will stick to Melee, no matter what, and more power to them for that. They’re the only 1v1 fighting game scene where they won’t move on to the newest game in their series, which is kind of funny when you compare that to the Smash 4 scene, because there’s no way Smash 4 will live on once Smash Ultimate is released.

When it comes to moving between games, you find your feet initially, figuring out rulesets for tournaments and how you’re going to run events for the game. The biggest logistical thing for the change to Smash 4 was the size of events. The UK wasn’t big on Brawl, so to get 20 people for a tournament was a big tournament. Nowadays we get 70 for a DBZ monthly and we’re disappointed with that. Regarding rulesets, I think if you want to try something new, you have to do it from the start, because once you ban something, like custom moves in Smash 4, there’s no way you’re going to get the community to go back and try it again. I do feel better prepared for this transition though because as an old Brawl veteran I’ve been through it before. The main issue is going to be securing consoles, as Switches are much smaller and easier to steal than Wii Us, so short of just zip-tying everything, I’m going to speak to the guys at Nintendo UK and try and figure out a better way of doing that. But in terms of gear, I’m in a much better spot: I had 0 monitors going into Smash 4 and going into Ultimate I have 54.

That is an incredible number of monitors… About Nintendo, I think it’s safe to say they are looking to become more involved with the competitive Smash scene, with events like Nintendo UK VS Live happening on 28^th/29^th July and featuring an invitational style Smash Ultimate tournament. Do you think their involvement is going to change the face of the scene, and how much do you feel it’s still down to the grassroots members of the scene to keep things going?

I’m going to be careful what I say here, because I don’t want to reveal anything I’m not supposed to! The way Nintendo works as a company makes it difficult to support the Smash community, even if they want to, as all their policy and decision-making is run through Nintendo Japan first. Everything comes out of there, and anything that Nintendo Europe or America want to do, they have to run it through Japan first. I see people online moaning at their local Nintendo branch about not supporting their scene and I wish they wouldn’t, because it’s not entirely in their hands. I do think Nintendo are gonna be more involved with Smash Ultimate. There were actually a couple of Nintendo UK Smash 4 events, which weren’t ran that well, but they tried, which is an important thing to remember. I’m hoping that we’re going to get more support in the future. Nintendo supported Albion 2 and they’re going to support Albion 3, they’re bringing Mario Tennis Aces. In an ideal world, they would have brought Smash Ultimate too, but we weren’t able to make that happen unfortunately. I can’t say much more now, but there will be something else Nintendo-related announced at Albion 3 for us. All I can say is make sure you play your best at Albion 3…

Very cryptic, and a nice plug! Albion 3 is of course coming up on 14^th/15^th July, the largest Smash 4 event in the UK, but is currently sitting at less entrants than Albion 2, what do you attribute that to?

There’s a ton of different reasons for this. I don’t think I’ve done as good a job advertising Albion 3 compared to Albion 2. I’ve had a lot more things going on in my personal life compared to last year, where I was able to focus literally all of my time on Smash, so that’s a big difference for me. There might be a few people who are taking their participation down with the release of Ultimate coming soon, but I don’t think that’s a huge factor. For a lot of lower level players, the 10-man round robin pools were a huge selling point for them, but we just can’t do that again because the strain on the TO team is too great. I wanted to make a statement with Albion 2 and really set a standard for how events should be run for the whole of Europe, and I feel like events are much better across the board because of it.

Do you take credit for this increase in standard?

Not specifically, the event’s success for example was definitely a team effort, I might have been making some of the bigger decisions but in terms of running the event on the weekend, that was 100% down to the team. It ran so well, Eve in particular is straight-up the best bracket manager and scheduler in Europe, and that was a huge factor. In terms of the increase in standard, I think people noticed on their own and raised the bar because of it, but I did make a point to post after the event about this and a lot of people saw that as well. At the end of the day though full credit goes to DAT Team as a whole: we ran a 300+ man event with half a dozen people, which shows just how good they are.

Fair enough. This has come up a couple of times but as a sidebar, do you think TOs can, or indeed should, compete at events they run?

It comes down to the size of the event. I think that TOs need to know the limits of what they can do. In an ideal world obviously you’d like to enter, because you’re still a competitor. I learnt that lesson the hard way when I initially had Ben and Eve helping me, they made me realise I can’t enter Singles and Doubles and TO the event all at the same time. I think TOs sometimes don’t understand that they need to make sacrifices for the good of the event. A good example of what I’m saying is New Era in Birmingham. Willz ran it, and he’s one of the only people I think who’s been around in Smash longer than I have, but I think because he didn’t enter because he’s a PR player, it ran well even though it had so much stuff all happening in one day. He’s relatively new to large scale TO-ing, but because he’s been around so long he’s seen all the mistakes that have been made by other TOs in the past, and this is what makes him good at it.

Yeah definitely, I think Team Regen and Willz are obviously going to be major players going into Smash Ultimate, along with DAT Team and Street Smash Manchester in the north. So, your message with Albion 2 was setting a standard for large-scale events in Europe. What is your message with Albion 3?

Albion 3 is about closure for me. For a lot of people in Smash 4, this is their final event. We haven’t heard anything about Syndicate this year, we don’t know if that’s happening, so as far as we know this is the final large European event for Smash 4. A lot of people have said to me they’re entering Albion, and then they’re done until Ultimate. It’s their last chance to prove themselves in Smash 4, and I’m definitely feeling that myself. I hope there’s a chance for new beginnings for DAT Team. This year we got a sponsorship from Bandai Namco to run DBFZ and Tekken. Whilst the numbers for that have been smaller than I hoped, it’s our first steps into the pure FGC as opposed to just the Smash FGC. The FGC in London doesn’t really have a major right now since the death of Super Versus Battle, and this is something I’ve wanted for a long time now, and maybe Albion can become that event for London in the future. This isn’t going to be the biggest Albion, and it certainly won’t be the last, but it will be the swansong of European Smash 4.

Speaking of the future, I’m not going to ask you to regurgitate your entire TwitLonger, as far as I understand you’re wanting to slow down on TO-ing after Albion until the release of Ultimate.

Yeah I mean, the thing is when games come to the end of their lifespan they naturally slow down. Because of this, the numbers go down, and because of this I can’t afford to run DBZs. It’s not about the money, I need to make that clear to people, but I have to be somewhere in the realm of breaking even, which isn’t happening right now. Meltdown realistically, unless the recent spike in numbers continues, is going to have to move to a fortnightly schedule rather than a weekly one. There’s also a lot of personal stuff going on at the moment that is really important for me to get right, and I can’t afford to spend all my time running Smash 4 events.

Another thing for the team is that post-Albion 2, we became a lot bigger and a lot more noticeable, which is great and I love that it happened, but a very small minority of people have used this to target us, about things like seeding in tournaments, and are trying to drag us down. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes, particularly with seeding, to make sure there aren’t conflicts regionally or scheduling problems, and some people don’t understand that and are not very polite when they voice their criticisms. This is an extremely small minority of people, I think I could count the people who are really bad with this on one hand, but what gets me is that as TOs themselves they should be aware of what they are saying. I’ve been doing this for years, I’ve got thick skin, but it does wear on me and my team to be getting these kinds of things said about us. TOs are people at the end of the day, and we belong to the community, and I think we give a lot of leeway to people. I’ve given people who are late a lot of extra time or gone out of my way to contact them when their games are due. These are situations where if it were the pure FGC, you’d be disqualified and if you complained then you’d be laughed out of the venue, but we don’t want to be like that because at the end of the day, we’re part of the community too.

What are your plans for the future then, for the release of Ultimate?

I’m planning on running events immediately as Ultimate drops. I really want Europe to be a strong region in its own right. I don’t want to pay players from the lowest spots on the PGR to come to our events, I want our events to be so good that people in the US and Europe look at them and think ‘I want to come here’. The gap between Europe and the rest of the world has shrunk massively between the beginning and end of Smash 4, but we need more events of high quality to keep pushing that down. We’ve had international players from Europe come to monthlies that aren’t even meant for them necessarily, so you can see where we’re heading. We’ve got a relatively good skill level across the board in European players, and we’ve got quality TOs all around Europe. When Ultimate comes out, we’ll be far better prepared than we were for Smash 4, and I hope we can continue to reduce the gap between ourselves and Japan and the US. Our community is far more open than it was at the start of Smash 4, and that can only be a good sign.

Anything else to add?

For people who are still wanting to compete in Smash 4, events aren’t stopping by any means, so don’t worry about that, and honestly, I want as many people as possible to come to and watch Albion 3. There are still big things to be announced, Nintendo have a big announcement on the Sunday so try and catch that if nothing else. Final shout-outs go to DAT Team, and my own region the East of England. There were a lot of dead regions at the start of Smash 4, including this one, but now we have 3 PR players in it. The final thing I want to say is, in regards to Meru’s TwitLonger about Europe and what he said about national pride within the continent, I have to agree with him when he says that a little national pride is definitely healthy, competition drives progress and I’d like to see that continue into Smash Ultimate, whilst also keeping the community as a whole open and communicating.