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How Axe became the first Smash Melee player to win a major with Pikachu
The Pikachu main has had a long journey to the top, but it’s all been worth it to be able to play the game he’s loved since his youth. Jeffrey ‘Axe’ Williamson breaks down his rise to major glory.
In a moment of pure exhilaration, Jeffrey ‘Axe’ Williamson leaps from his seat and lets out a howling “YESSSSSS!”, drowning out the casters in the process. As he rises, his fist shoots through the air, clearly shaking from the adrenaline, with the other hand still firmly grasping the GameCube controller that has brought him to this moment. His face goes from laser-focused to joyous – and then shocked.
Following his surprising outburst, a respectful handshake and hug with his opponent, Axe is motionless for a good 30 seconds; his head bowed and covered by his Pikachu hat, his chest moving like he's just ran a marathon. Eventually he sinks back to his chair and the emotions start to show. 13 years after he started playing Melee seriously, and after years of being told he could never do it with a low-tier character like Pikachu, Axe finally proved them wrong by lifting the Smash Summit 8 trophy in June.
To even make it to the final of Smash Summit 8 would have been quite an achievement, as Axe came out on top in some of the closest matches of the entire competition. In Winners Round 2 he was almost knocked out by Zain Naghmi, going down 2-1 before pulling it back to win 3-2 in a very close match. Axe described it as one of the two most intense matches he had at The Summit – the other of course being the grand final against Justin ‘Wizzrobe’ Hallett.
But before he got there, he had to take down Joseph ‘Mango’ Marquez, a player who most expected to do well thanks to his recent success. However, Axe triumphed in another match that ended 3-2 in his favour. Next, he faced off against Wizzrobe for the first time, notching a slightly more comfortable 3-1 win before taking down William ‘Leffen’ Hjelte, The God Slayer, in another 3-2 spectacle. One small mistake in most of these matches could have seen Axe fall to the lower bracket, but when it really mattered he managed to pull through and finally secure his place in the grand final.
“The mental battles I had to go through were insane,” Axe tells us. “Every time I got close to winning [a tournament], I would think to myself, ‘I can do this! The win is right there! I'm so close to the end.’ Then I lose. It has happened multiple times this year at different events and also started happening at Summit. I had to keep telling myself ‘No, don't think about that. Focus.’ Any time spent thinking about winning is a distraction.”
Early days
Williamson was born in Germany as a ‘military kid’, but was raised in Sierra Vista, Arizona, a small town of around 44,000 people. With not much in the way of entertainment for kids in the area, Axe and his two older siblings played a lot of video games. Super Mario World on the SNES was the first game he remembers playing; “I absolutely loved my SNES,” he comments, reminiscing about the old times. He also recalls having a great time with Smash 64, which started his appreciation for the series.
There was an advertisement for a tournament at my high school. I competed, thinking I was the best, and lost round one pretty badly
But the most important game of his life would be released a few months after his 10th birthday. When Super Smash Bros. Melee came out in 2001, a young Axe fell in love with the game, kicking off a journey that would eventually lead to his future career. He played for hours and, in his mind at least, got pretty good at it.
It took five years for Axe to discover the competitive Melee scene. By this time he was in high school and that's where he saw an advertisement for what would be his first Melee tournament. Confident in his abilities, he signed up – but things didn’t quite go to plan. “I competed, thinking I was the best, and lost round one pretty badly,” he says.
For many, a crushing defeat and major hit to the ego would have been enough to put down the pad and move on to something else, but for Axe this only served as more motivation. Others in the competition encouraged him to practise for the following year’s tournament and Axe did exactly that, looking online for techniques on how to play.
Pikachu has been seen as an unorthodox character pick
© Long Nguyen/Red Bull Content Pool
While doing this, he found out there were much larger tournaments not that far from him, so he decided that if he was going to get better, he'd have to start playing against the best. In 2007, he attended his first state tournament and by this time he'd put in enough practice to win two or three rounds. That helped to put the round-one loss from his high-school tournament well and truly behind him – and he started having a great time.
“Back then, I never would have dreamed I would now be travelling all over the world to play in Melee tournaments and have that as my full-time job,” says Axe. “If I told myself back then that I would one day be the champion of the highest calibre tournament in the world, I never would have believed it… I just had a drive for competition and I wanted to get good enough to put up a good fight against everyone. Not just that, but I loved the game itself.”
I never really had a passion for anything except for competing in tournaments
Axe continued to attend local tournaments over the next few years and started to get pretty good. Back then, the pro Melee scene wasn't what it is today and to make a living from doing it was challenging even for the very best players in the world. While that was always the goal for Axe, it never really seemed realistic that he'd be able to pull it off, so as his education started to wind down, he had to consider options as to what he would do.
He tells us that he went to college for a couple of years to study video game programming, but found that it was nowhere near as fun competing in Smash, so that didn’t really work out. With no realistic chance of making Melee a career at that point, he took a job at Walgreens, the second-largest pharmacy store chain in the United States, and kept playing Melee in his spare time.
“Throughout those years, I never really had a passion for anything except for competing in tournaments,” says Axe. “When I graduated, all I really wanted to do was find some job that maybe I don't mind too much in order to get money. I would use that money to go to Melee tournaments and that's all I really wanted to do.”
Pikachu, I choose you
As Axe continued to compete and started to become a bit of a known figure in the Smash community, many began to question his choice of character. While most had settled on the likes of Fox and Falco as their mains, Axe was playing with Pikachu, a character pretty close to the bottom of the tier lists and one that few people thought could ever be competitive at the very top levels. Many would have dropped the character and tried to make it work with one of the higher-ranked options, but Axe knew that the little yellow electric mouse was the way forward.
“I think about Melee in a unique way,” says Axe. “I can play pretty much any character at a high level now, but something really clicks when I play as Pikachu. I don't get this feeling when I use any other character. I have more hours practised in some of my secondary characters, especially Falco. Despite that, there's something that makes complete sense to me when fighting someone else with Pikachu.
“In order to really feel comfortable though, I've had to create new tricks and techniques to improve with him. It's the kind of work that most people aren't willing to put into underdeveloped characters, but I found it so fun that I just didn't think of it as work. I think most people have a different idea of how you're supposed to fight in Melee, so they find Pikachu difficult to use compared to most of the high tiers. But I'm the opposite. Playing Pikachu actually feels easier to me.”
It turned out to be an inspired decision to stick with Pikachu. Using the Pokémon mascot, Axe rose to the top echelon of the Melee scene, just as the scene was starting to pick up steam once again and the really big prizes began to return. In 2010 he had what he describes as his ‘breakout tournament’ at Apex where he took down big names such as Jesus ‘Jman’ Fernandez and Bronson ‘DaShizWiz’ Layton. He even managed to take a game off Smash god Adam ‘Armada’ Lindgren, “which most people thought wasn't possible for a Pikachu to do at the time,” he says.
Jeffrey ‘Axe’ Williamson has had a long road to the top
© Long Nguyen/Red Bull Content Pool
Rising up
Following this, he continued to play and place well at the biggest Melee tournaments, firmly cementing himself as one of the best players in the world – without a doubt the best Pikachu main. 2014 in particular was a year of many highlights for Axe. At MLG Anaheim, he took down the likes of Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman and Juan ‘Hungrybox’ Debiedma on route to a 5th/6th-place finish. To celebrate, he went to Disneyland straight after the competition, as he tells us, “loved every minute of it.”
Then at Evo that year he had what he describes as his "most notable match". Facing off against Otto ‘Silent Wolf’ Bisno on the main Evo stage in Vegas was an experience unlike any other and the bout was all tied up at 1-1, in a best of three, setting up an intense final battle. But then Axe seemed to take it to another level and four-stocked Silent Wolf in under 60 seconds, sending the crowd absolutely crazy.
“Never have I seen such a huge wave of thousands of people so excited to watch me like that. It was so surreal,” Axe recalls of that particular moment. “I was so excited that I couldn't help but jump out of my seat. It was the experience of a lifetime.”
His impressive performances throughout 2014 and early 2015 earned him a place on Tempo Storm, the esports organisation he's still with to this day. This allowed him to really focus on playing Melee and not have to worry about a lot of the more logistical citations in esports, giving him some extra stability on his route to the top. “They have always treated me like I'm family,” says Axe when talking about his Tempo Storm colleagues.
As the years rolled on, Axe continued to be a top player, with multiple top-10 finishes at many of the biggest events in the world of Smash. Top six at both Smash Summit 5 and 7, third at DreamHack Denver 2017 and GOML 2018, and even second at GENESIS 6 and GOML 2019 showed that he was capable of beating anyone in the world on his day. That final victory to take first place remained elusive, however. Then Smash Summit 8 kicked off.
The sweet taste of victory
As Axe prepared to face Wizzrobe in the final of Smash Summit 8 he knew that he had a great chance of finally taking home a win at a major tournament. Having been denied at the final hurdle twice this year already, he was determined to take the win, but things didn't get off to a good start. Wizzrobe, coming from the losers bracket, beat Axe 3-1 and reset the bracket, meaning it all came down to a final best of five.
“I beat him earlier in the bracket, so the thoughts of winning kept crawling back in my head and making me focus just a tiny bit less on the match itself,” says Axe. “He eventually won the first set of grand finals. I think that's when the turning point for me happened. That's when I realised I was basically guaranteed to lose if I didn't get my head straight.”
The second best-of-five of the final was a tense affair, but after the first two games, Axe found himself on championship point. Another close game went the way of Wizzrobe, but then on Final Destination, Axe pulled it off. As he managed to grab Wizzrobe’s Captain Falcon, everyone watching knew this was his moment. Provided he hit a combination he has managed to hit thousands of times before the win would be his. As soon as he realised Captain Falcon would miss the edge of the stage by mere millimetres, the burst of emotion shot out of Axe. He was finally a major event champion.
As the crowd of onlookers watched his emotional reaction to the win there was barely a dry eye in the house. Even Smash Summit 7 champion Hungrybox choked up as he handed Axe his trophy. Despite the mass of emotions filling him up, Axe still managed to find time to wish his father a Happy Fathers' Day with his first words on camera after winning the event – and then in true Axe fashion, just really had a craving for some pizza.
The journey has been absolutely insane and I honestly still can't believe that I won.
18 years after he first played Melee and 13 years after getting knocked out in round one at his first tournament back at his high school, Axe was finally a major champion and the first person to do so with Pikachu. His legacy as one of the best to ever play Melee has certainly been cemented.
“The journey has been absolutely insane and I honestly still can't believe that I won,” says Axe. “It's something I've been working so hard towards for so long; I just wasn't sure if it would ever happen. I still kept trying though, win or lose. Holding the trophy after winning felt unreal. Honestly it feels like it was all a dream or something. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.”
