Hbox, Liquid, and a 10 year journey to the top of Smash
2014 marked the return of competitive Super Smash Bros. to the forefront of esports. The Smash Documentary had hit its peak popularity, Melee returned to Evo through a huge donation drive, Smash tournaments were gaining more entrants than ever before, and its most prominent top level competitors were now getting sponsored by the largest organizations. This was an undeniable step forward from the previous years of mostly grassroots teams and threadbare sponsors.
No signing was more indicative of the changing times than the signing of Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma by Team Curse on April 17, 2014. Team Liquid would acquire Team Curse shortly afterward, meaning today will officially mark the 10th anniversary of the partnership between Hungrybox and Team Liquid.
So, there’s no better time to look back on what Hbox has done in his ten-year tenure at Team Liquid. There’s no one better to reflect on it with than the man himself — who gave his thoughts on all the ups and downs of his career — and one of the Smash Community’s biggest commentators and content creators, Walt “turndownforwalt” Brandsema. In going over the history with Walt and Hungrybox, you see not only the birth of a Melee legend, but a player and content creator who might be the most overall successful figure in the entirety of Smash.
Phase 1: The Climb (2014 - 2016)
Shortly after the time of Hungrybox’s signing, he was considered one of the Five Gods of Melee; a group so exclusive that it is said only they were the ones capable of winning the largest Melee tournaments, primarily defeating each other and rarely ever losing to anyone else. The truth, however, is a little more nuanced. Before Hungrybox's signing with Team Curse, three of the five gods were taking turns winning the largest events: Mango, Armada, and PPMD.
“I think what made me different was who I played, Jigglypuff, and how I played,” Hungrybox said. "I was the antithesis of how people thought Melee should be played; the auto-corrector to aggressive gameplay, and by far the least popular of the five.”
Although Hungrybox had a reputation for being able to occasionally defeat each of his four toughest peers, he struggled to definitively prove himself as the best player for any significant amount of time. Combined with his penchant for more defensive gameplay, what made Hungrybox’s initial struggles especially different was his relationship to competing itself. Even he concedes that he was, for a while, the fifth-best of the gods, and temporarily the most likely one to fall off, especially as Leffen entered the picture as a threat.
“I feel like every time I looked into Smash, I made it a mission of mine to make it the reward for succeeding in other areas of my life” Hungrybox said. “When you’re a kid and have parents to guide you, it was one thing, but when I was in college, or when I was working, I knew that gaming, back then, just wasn’t really a guarantee.”
While his most bitter rivals were all in on the esports grind, Hungrybox had a budding career as a chemical engineer, his academic pursuits, and even his brief time with a cappella. For example, shortly before Evo 2015, Hungrybox all but confirmed he’d be dialing back his Smash pursuits afterward.
Walt, someone who similarly has an engineering background and eventually pivoted toward a career in esports, spoke about the challenges that came with balancing the traditional success pipeline with the dream of esports.
“Many reach a tipping point where an opportunity arises and you have to make a choice,” Walt said. “But Juan set himself up in a way where that opportunity presented itself as less of a leap of faith and more of a small, incremental step towards achieving that dream.”
“Looking back, it is crazy that I basically lived multiple lives at once,” Hungrybox said. “But Smash wasn’t like basketball, where the path to being a professional is streamed; Smash just happened to be coincidental - the reward I had for everything else in my life.”
Over the next couple of years, and even during his time as a professional engineer, Hungrybox would slowly grow to become one of the scene’s definitive giants. But if Hbox’s job or time allocation hadn’t changed — what had?
Looking back on it, Hungrybox noted a multitude of factors that came together to make his sudden ascendance possible. But probably the most notable and public factor was his coach: Luis “Crunch” Rosias. Crunch and Hbox had been friends all the way since childhood and Crunch offered an understanding and insight that pretty much no one else in the scene could match. He knew Hbox’s flaws in menatility, not just in gameplay, and helped him patch them almost immediately. Crunch joined Hbox’s team in the middle of 2015 and the latter half of that year saw Hbox get to more Grand Finals than he’d ever had before.
[Read more about Crunch’s coaching here.]
Although, no moment marked Hungrybox’s competitive ascent quite like Evo 2016. Evo 2016 represented not only Smash’s return to form as an esport, but its reaching brand new heights. To this day, it remains the largest offline Melee tournament of all-time. In front of more than 200,000 viewers, Hungrybox would defeat Armada and not only win the biggest tournament of all-time but break through a crucial mental barrier in the process.
“Every sport, every competitive medium has the biggest events that everyone knows, and for me, winning Evo was validation; the event that showed me that I could hang with the greatest of all-time,” Hungrybox said. “The funny thing about it is that my goal was just to get Top 2 - not that I thought I couldn’t beat Armada, but getting to him made me absent of fear and play some of the best Melee of my life.”
As it turned out, the taste of winning was something that Hungrybox wasn’t willing to let go of. Shortly after winning Evo, he was traveling for work and, mid-small talk with his colleagues, he briefly mentioned his competitive gaming career. When Hungrybox brought up that he won Evo and answered a question about money he made from winning, everybody went silent. “After a while, one of the guys there, this 60 year-old, he looked down, laughed, then looked at me and asked, ‘then what the fuck are you doing here?’”
Hungrybox said that was the moment that made him realize that something wasn’t quite adding up. It was less about the money he could make from Smash, and more so the fact that he was still young and had a chance to take a risk; to do something crazy.
“There’s certain times in life, where you get these fleeting opportunities to become a legend.”
Phase 2: Becoming a legend (2016-2020)
In October 2016, amid major victories from each of Mango and Armada, as well as a brief mini-slump, Hungrybox quit his job as a chemical engineer to go into competitive gaming, full-time. He had reached the pinnacle of the game, going from a member of a group to a contender for best player in the world. The next goal: drop the “contender” part. Luckily for him, the fact that he had a day job (and had just quit it) gave him a morale boost while the other Gods were burning out.
“Wanting to be the best, I was hooked on competing, and while everyone was complaining about being burned out, I always wanted to run that shit back,” Hungrybox said. “Whether I won majors or got my ass kicked by Wizzy or SFAT or whoever, I was just fully into the grind.”
In the second half of 2017, Hungrybox started to hit his stride. Winning one tournament in Shine was a comeback. But one tournament win turned into two. Then it became a streak, with three. Ultimately, he would win five majors to close out the year, finishing as the world No. 1 for the first time in his career.
According to Walt, it was especially notable because Hungrybox was the last of the Five Gods to have that moment where he could confidently call himself the best in the game.
“It was practically a passing of the torch moment for Hungrybox, the last player of the Five Gods, to finally get his flowers,” Walt said.
Hbox would do more than get his flowers and leave the stage. He would ascend to the top of the pantheon and establish a reign that no competitor has since matched. Hungrybox would reach rank 1 three years in a row — 2017, 2018, 2019. It’s the only time anyone has ever done that in SSBMRank history, and it is almost certainly the longest stretch of dominance ever seen in modern Melee. But as he found out, winning had a price.
“Let’s be honest, I’m a histrionic guy - if I win once, people love it, but if it’s all the time, and I’m popping off after every stock, hooting and hollering like an animal, people are going to hate it,” Hungrybox said, adding that he’s now witnessed the same pattern with other smashers in the current era, like Cody Schwab. “I learned the hard way that when you beat everyone who tries to get to the top of the mountain, at a certain point, everybody else wants to see you fall.”
As he continued winning; Hungrybox found himself caught in a nonstop cycle. He would attend a tournament, win it, beat his toughest peers, and leave as the winner nobody wanted to see. It was one thing when it came in the form of banter or trash talk from opponents; another when it escalated. For example, in one moment at Super Smash Con 2018, the act of Hungrybox checking his watch mid-set against Mew2King drew him online harassment, as well as catalyzed Hungrybox to take a break from social media.
The hate never fully let up for Hbox, in part because he had long played a pretty different social role than the other Gods. With one foot in and one foot out of Smash, the other gods would sometimes remark that he was the most distant, the one they felt they knew the least. At the same time, Hbox rose to prominence in the scene when he was young and immature and made plenty of social faux pas and outright mistakes. To top it all off, he was not just the only God to play Puff (and not to play Fox or Falco at all), but the only Puff main to ever rank in the top 10. (Though, Mango would have made the top 10 had there been rankings when he played Puff.)
When Hbox won, it sparked bizarrely complex discussions and feedback loops. Was Hbox a jerk? Were others jerks to him? Had he changed his ways? Have others changes their ways? Who was Hbox now? What is Smash now? Is Puff a problem character? Do people want to watch Puff? Does Hbox being the only top 10 Puff player in Melee cahnge anything? These questions could be fair checks and callouts to a large community figure. But they could also be overly-granular litigations over random personality traits. The “checking the watch” moment was one of many granular litigations on the character (and character choice) of a flawed, somewhat solitary, self-admittedly histrionic, and very singular Melee figure. And while every God got some level of this discourse, it probably is fair to say that Hbox got more of it than anyone else in the pantheon (and most other top players).
The back and forth debates around Hbox made it fairly hard for him to exist normally in the Melee side of the Smash Community. But he had found something of a new home in the world of the new Smash titles, just as a commentator instead of competitor. Hbox would commentate at Frostbite 2018, a massive Smash 4 event, to glowing praise from the Smash 4community, where he’d had much more of a blank slate. It was also a chance for him to hone his craft as an entertainer in a way he couldn’t within Melee.
However, the undeniable low point for his relationship with the Smash community came from his victory at Pound 2019. After winning the tournament through the losers bracket, and before getting a full chance to celebrate, someone in the crowd threw a crab at him. In Hungrybox’s account, this was a situation where, immediately afterward, the community seemed to realize that its treatment of him had gone way too far.
A little under a year after the crab throw, a now-viral documentary about Hungrybox came out: “There will Never Ever be another Melee player like Hungrybox.” Made by YouTuber EMPLemon, and currently sitting at just above 9 million views, this documentary massively shifted community-wide perception of Hungrybox. It meant the world to Hungrybox, who, it’s worth noting, went to the same college as EMPLemon.
“When I watched it, it really moved me, not just because it basically was a sequel to the original Smash documentary, but because the most important parts captured how I really felt about the community, a lot of mistaken assumptions about me, and gave me a voice,” Hungrybox said. “It was not only bigger than I ever could have expected, but it changed my life.”
Phase 3: A Sudden Turn (2020 - 2021)
Shortly afterward came an even bigger life-changing series of events in the COVID-19 pandemic. For the next year and a half, the overwhelming majority of people in Smash were stuck in their homes, mostly miserable, and waiting for the world to open up again. But it was also a time of tremendous growth and transformation within the Smash scene.
Melee, Hungrybox’s primary game of choice, now had fan-developed online rollback netplay in Slippi, which transcended previous versions of delay-based netplay. In fact, Slippi itself would lead to the community having one of its biggest years yet, with online attendance at events and restored interest in Melee leading the Smash scene to overcoming the odds. But at the same time as Melee's relative online renaissance during the pandemic, Hungrybox himself had a strange development in his career. Seemingly out of nowhere, Hungrybox began losing.
“Don’t forget; the world felt different, not just Smash,” Hungrybox said. “I was in my house the entire time instead of being out at tournaments, and had to relearn everything.”
According to Hungrybox, when he played in-person, he had felt like he had created an edge for himself, whether it was feeling the nerves of his opponent or the crowd behind them. Online, however, he was just by himself, or worse yet: splitting attention with his stream chat during key moments. Even when comments were positive, it was difficult for him to focus in the same way that he could do at in-person events.
“The lowest point was when I got demoted to Division 2 at SCL,” Hungrybox said, referencing a week of Summit Champions League where he lost to Azel. “Azel’s a great player, but it was the most humbling experience of my life, to go from number one three years in a row, and potentially the chance of a fourth year, to basically having no respectable results.”
It wasn't just Azel, and it wasn't just top players he used to beat. He was even dropping sets to people with seemingly AI-generated tags like “Harry Pogger.” Hungrybox’s decline in tournament performances was one of the most baffling storylines in the Melee scene. At one point, some smashers even speculated that Hungrybox intentionally threw sets for content. Hungrybox stressed that he never tried to lose sets, he just had split attention and struggled with managing it while competing online.
“How can people think I would get more subscriptions by losing and throwing sets instead of winning and celebrating with my stream because it’s hype?” Hungrybox asked. “I never threw sets, I just sucked.”
Hungrybox still managed to make the most of this time. His personal stream blew up, in large part thanks to his burgeoning talent for being a Smash Ultimate streamer — and the roots he placed in that community as an entertainer. Hungrybox says that during the pandemic he would hit peak viewership at 3,000 people for merely streaming Ultimate. Per Sullygnome, in 2020 online, his stream drew over 2 million watch time hours on Twitch for Ultimate.
“Even heading into the year, I knew I wasn’t always going to compete at the highest level of Melee forever,” Hungrybox said. “Coming into my own as a streamer, realizing that so many people actually liked my personality and that I could really just be myself was the obvious career decision, and I actually love it.”
With his Smash career on two seemingly contradictory trajectories — growth as an Ultimate streamer and decline as a Melee competitor — Hungrybox would eventually reach a climactic point for both of them. For the first time since 2016's Smash Summit 2, his first Summit appearance, Hungrybox did not receive an invitation to 2021's Smash Summit 11. In order to make the event, he had to do something he never thought he’d ever have to: campaign for Summit and ask his newfound large fanbase for its support.
“I mean, everyone saw that I now had to basically beg my fans for support and that I would do well,” Hungrybox said. “I had Mew2King and Plup come over, we had the hot tub streams, my fans voted for me to get me into Summit, and I knew that when I got there, I had to prove that it would be worth it.”
Phase 4: Perseverance (2021 - 2024)
Upon getting to Smash Summit 11, defeating Cody Schwab and even making it to the winners finals against Zain en route to a third place finish, Hungrybox knew that he could make a career comeback in Melee. According to him, the experience proved that he could still hang with the big dogs and that it wasn’t impossible for him to make it back to the top even while doing content; it was just hard.
“It’s one thing to claw your way to the top of the mountain, but when you suddenly fall from grace, just imagine how sick it would be to climb right back up that mountain.”
Since then, Hungrybox has mostly settled in place as a top echelon competitor. In 2022, he won two Majors in GOML 2022 and Riptide. While he failed to win a Major in 2023, he nonetheless ended the year at No. 6 on the annual rankings. He has yet to recreate his best days since the return to offline competition, but strangely enough, he appears to be roughly as likely to win a major today as he was when he signed with Team Liquid.
Through it all, one statistic stands out: Hungrybox has yet to miss a single supermajor top eight since finishing in ninth place at The Big House 4. Yes, that was the one held in 2014. To date, it’s the longest top eight streak in the history of competitive Melee.
"I think this is a very clear personification of perseverance,” Walt said. “It shouldn’t be understated how insanely difficult that is to do. For Hungrybox to attend so many events and perform so consistently at all of them for as long as he has, that’s a truly impressive level of consistency.”
Walt noted that it was especially stunning in hindsight because Hungrybox was initially looked down on when compared to the other gods, if not the one whose longevity seemed most in question.
“And yet unlike any of them, he holds this incredibly long tenure of consistency on the biggest stage that no single player has come close to approaching,” Walt said. To date, Hungrybox has by far the most major top eights of all-time at 133. The only other player in Melee history with more than 100 major top eights is Mango, at 101.
Perhaps the most interesting element to this phase of Hungrybox’s career is his new relationship with the community. Due to a combination of his rise to prominence as a Smash Ultimate streamer, his time spent TO’ing one of the largest online tournament series, and the fact that he no longer wins tournaments all the time, he has become a bit of a hero once again. It's a far cry from having a crab thrown at him.
“I can honestly say that right now is when I’ve had the single best relationship ever with Smash,” Hungrybox said. But even still, he has goals to make his way back to the throne. Although he recognizes that it’s an especially difficult time to become No. 1 again, given character diversity and the heavily competitive nature of modern Melee, Hungrybox notes one particular obstacle for him that he views as critical to any chance he has of winning a major: Zain, who has now beaten Hungrybox 13 times in a row.
“Every time I meet him in bracket, it ends the run,” Hungrybox said. “If I don’t figure him out, I’m never going to win a major again, or at least not the way I personally want to win a major.”
Nonetheless, Hungrybox said his current goal wasn’t just to make it back to No. 1; he wants to be the best player in the world by as convincing of a margin as he had in his 2017-2019 prime. According to Hungrybox, touching the ceiling one last time and being just as dominant would be the final note in his career, the last thing he needs for him to consider himself the greatest player of all-time.
“I’m not the greatest right now; not yet,” Hungrybox said, saying that he still considers Mango and Armada above himself on the pantheon of all-time Melee legends. “To have a fall from grace, to redeem myself, to now have a community that loves me so much, and to be number one again, that would be true greatness.”
Where is Hbox's legacy right now?
Hungrybox began his time with Team Liquid as a member of Melee’s elite, slowly working his way up to sit on the game’s throne. When he got there, Hungrybox reigned over the scene longer than anyone in modern Melee history. Even when he eventually fell from the top, he rediscovered himself as an entertainer in an entirely new Smash game, growing to become a content kingpin for the entire community. In many ways, his story directly parallels the rise, fall, rebirth, and resilience of the entire Smash scene.
“I think Hungrybox’s time at Team Liquid is a representation of someone who proved they could live that dream,” Walt said. “Regardless of what your impression of esports may be, it’s undeniable that many who exist in this community want to be able to do what somebody like Hungrybox does. It’s wonderful seeing his grind and hustle culminate into something so respectable.”
As colossal as these last ten years have been, they aren’t only important by themselves. They tell a story within a larger one about Hungrybox’s career and where it fits in the history of Smash. In the last ten years, it could be argued that Hungrybox has been the single most holistically successful Smasher on the planet.
Beyond his competitive achievements, he has the most followed YouTube channel of any Melee player, boasting half a million subscribers. Across Melee and Ultimate, he’s earned millions of watch time hours on Twitch, countless donations, and hundreds of thousands of views. Of every smasher of these last ten years, Hungrybox, more than anyone else, has lived the dream of being a pro smasher.
“Doing this for a living is incredibly bizarre, but I consider myself very lucky at the same time,” Hungrybox said. “Much love to everyone who gave me a shot enjoying what I do inside and outside of competing in Melee, and it’s something I’ll never take for granted.
“Thank you to Team Liquid, for the last ten years of this strange chaotic, silly life.”
