A Smashing Success
Talking “Super Smash Brothers” with top Vegas player Dakota “Dakpo” Goode
By Jade Darr | Photos by Tyler Boshard
In a world of subreddits, discord servers, and niche online forums, the word ‘community’ can be used to describe a massive range of groups. Some communities can consist of people whose relationships never stretch beyond conversations on a topic of interest while other communities can be downright hostile. It’s a beautiful thing, then, to find a community that suits both the modern and traditional understandings of the world: a welcoming group of people that form meaningful connections through mutual support.
The fact that Super Smash Brothers players have formed such a community is due largely to players like Dakpo. For those who are unfamiliar, Super Smash Brothers (Smash for short) is a platform fighter video game series where a number of players (usually two) try to damage each other’s characters in order to knock them off of a stage. The game started out as a party game, but the mechanics were so fun and complex that it eventually spawned a massive competitive community. Tournaments range from weekly events with dozens of participants to major annual tournaments with thousands of competitors. They can also take basically anywhere: living rooms, casinos, arcades, or basically anywhere people can plug in a bunch of Nintendo Switches and display monitors. Finding the events is easy — there’s an entire discord server just dedicated to Smash events in Vegas — but actually gearing up to go to them, knowing you’ll most likely get slaughtered by veteran players, can be intimidating.
I must have heard Dakpo’s name a dozen times while attending my first few in-person Super Smash Brothers tournaments in Las Vegas. I’d mill about each event, playing ‘friendly’ non-tournament matches with other players, and I’d inevitably tell them how new I was to the scene. It’s incredible how consistently friendly and welcoming players are. More often than not, they’d give me excellent tips to improve my play, as well as the lowdown on who I should meet and talk to. People couldn’t stop talking about how great of a player, and how great of a person, that this enigmatic “Dakpo” was. As a player who has been in the top five of two different city’s power rankings — 3rd in Dallas Fort-Worth and 4th here in Las Vegas — Dakpo’s gained quite the reputation as both a competitor and as a coach for other players.
A year later, I find myself sitting down with Dakpo, who is just as friendly and as welcoming as his shining reputation makes him out to be. Dakpo is the tag — the competitive/stage name — for Las Vegan Dakota Goode. He’s a tall guy with a friendly smile, and he looks exactly like the sort of guy who’d destroy you in basketball all while quietly hyping you up every time you manage a shot. Sure, he’s a top Super Smash Brothers player who can (and does) wipe the floor with the vast majority of his opponents, but he’s also a gameplay innovator whose discoveries of in-game mechanics have shaped and impacted the playstyles of competitors around the world. If you comb through his X (formerly known as Twitter) account, you’ll see dozens and dozens of videos showing off optimized combos other players simply don’t know about. It’s the perfect compliment to Dakota’s role as a coach, which is a role he’s been playing since his years at college.
“I went to school for music education, initially, which was really fun,” Dakota tells me. “I was learning educational styles and music, but at the same time, I was also doing private lessons and teaching people how to play Smash. I was really involved in the community that way. Education has definitely been a hallmark of my identity, whether it be in Smash or my personal life. That's what I do.”
Dakota’s own Smash experience started like many do. He received the game as a kid, became the best in his friend group, and developed the illusions-of-grandeur common to talented players yet to be truly tested.
“My parents got Smash 64 as a Christmas gift for me. I was very, very young, and I just fell in love with the game. It had all my favorite characters from Nintendo and I was like, oh, this is the best,” Dakota recalls. “And then in 2008, (Super Smash Brothers) Brawl came out. I was a little bit older at this point — I was in high school. I was better than my friends.”
“So I was like, yeah, I'm probably the best in the world,” he adds, laughing.
It was only a matter of time until that belief was shattered.
“I entered an online event for the first time, because (Super Smash Brothers Brawl) had online play for the first time in the series. I got crushed, absolutely crushed,” Dakota tells me. “I was like, oh no, I'm not the best in the world, how can I let this happen?”
Part of the reason that Dakota is a great teacher is due to his empathy for new players. There’s a familiar mix of overconfidence, talent, and fear of failure that new players have to sort out. If players aren’t prepared to lose and learn, they might find themselves permanently discouraged by a weak first tournament performance; even worse, they may let fear prevent them from ever competing in the first place. But once someone actually shows up to their first competition, Goode has some universal advice for them in order to help them process the experience.
“I tell somebody at their first tournament that (one of) two things are gonna happen,” Dakota tells me. “You either get crushed and you're gonna be like, ‘cool…you guys have fun.’ Or you're gonna get crushed and go, ‘That was really cool. I want to get better.’”
While someone unfamiliar with eSports might look at a smash tournament and see a bunch of people playing video games, the truth is that learning the art of Smash is similar to learning any art or complex skill. Dakpo’s approach to teaching also stems from his experience in his rigorous courses at the United States’ first jazz performance program at North Texas State University, where many of the best players around the country came together to find themselves suddenly at the middle, or bottom, of the institution’s roster.
“It was a very humbling experience,” Dakota recalls. “One of the big things they taught there was that you want to get to a point where you have complete mastery and the freedom to do whatever you want. But to get to that point, you have to practice and then imitate the masters. That concept is so important for so many different skills, especially Smash.”
The Vegas Smash scene is a strong one. Walk into a local tournament and you’ll see a host of friend groups huddled together discussing new techniques, high-profile matches, and everything else under the sun whether Smash-related or not. You’ll see dedicated community organizers like Ven and Countess, whose work to establish and run tournaments forms the foundation of the scene through weekly events. And if you go to the right tournaments at the right time, you’ll see Dakota laughing and chatting with other top players in the community in between tournament sets. The friendly spirit at the events, Dakota thinks, is partially attributable to Vegas itself, a city which has a positive quality that many might overlook.
“I think one thing important about Vegas culture, specifically that people don't think about is what type of careers are generated in a city like this, right?” he tells me. “We are the entertainment capital of the world. That means we have a lot, a lot of people that are working customer service at hotels…you have a lot of people that work in hospitality. You have a lot of people who know how to treat other people.”
You can follow Dakota, @TheDakpo, on X, where he regularly posts Smash-related content. You can jump into the Las Vegas Smash scene by following their account on X,@VegasSmash. The link to the aforementioned Discord can be found on their profile description.
Jade Darr is a poet, editor, and educator based in Las Vegas. Their art is splashed across various dusty corners of the internet, and it is all absolutely amazing. They are a zealous disciple of Joy Williams and Laurel Halo, and they will not rest until you have seen Puss in Boots 2. Oh, you haven’t Well let me tell you…
