20XX

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Part of a series on Super Smash Brothers Melee. [View Related Entries]

About

20XX is a hypothetical prediction for the future of the Super Smash Bros Melee community, in which all players have mastered the character Fox and winners are chosen entirely by port priority.

Origin

The term "20XX" originates from games in the Mega Man franchise which are set in the ambiguous year "20XX." In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the character Fox is considered by many to be the most powerful character due to his unique moveset, which includes the versatile special ability "shine." In October 2013, commentator Kris "Toph" Alexander described the concept of "20XX" during the Big House 3 tournament:

"Geez, I really hope no more Foxes play on this stream cause I'm just gonna have to listen to this endless complaining about how good my character is… [Aziz "Hax" Al-Yami] has this running joke about--so you know how in Megaman, in the Megaman Show, it's like, "the year is 20XX…" So Aziz's thing is, "the year is 20XX, everyone plays Fox…" And there's this whole post-apocalyptic universe that is built off of Fox being the only viable character left… Humanity has reached its pinnacle… The peasants are living in poverty… And there's these monasteries where these Fox monks just levitate and TAS Fox with one hand, and win a tournament with the other… The tournament metagame has gotten to this point where everything is played out to theoretical perfection, so they Rock Paper Scissors for port priority, and that's the set, and everyone gets really excited about the port priority RPS. So RPS's metagame has really evolved to where it's really just like RPS tournaments are now. […] And then we have warriors like Kevin ["PewPewU"] Toy and Europhoria desperately trying to prevent the apocalypse, the Fox Apocalypse, from happening with their Marths…"

Spread

On November 18th, 2013, Redditor SpankThatDill submitted a post titled "Can someone explain the 20XX reference to me?" to the /r/smashbros^[2] subreddit, to which Redditor Nannose replied with a copypasta about the 20XX concept:

The year is 20XX. Everyone plays Fox at TAS levels of perfection. Because of this, the winner of a match depends solely on port priority. The RPS metagame has evolved to ridiculous levels due to it being the only remaining factor to decide matches.

On March 29th, 2014, Smash Boards user achilles1515^[3] posted a Melee ROM hack titled "20XX," designed as a training mod for the hypothetical 20XX scenario. On November 25th, a 20XX game was released on Valve's Steam^[4] store (shown below, left). On March 25th, 2015, YouTuber Dan Salvato uploaded an announcement trailer for the 20XX: Tournament Edition game mod (shown below, right).