Do you remember when Hbox was inevitable?

I ask because it’s been a while. From 2017 to early 2020 Hbox was winning so regularly that he seemed unbeatable — and the Melee community mythologized it that way. In one Summit 2018 skit, Mang0 time travels to try and stop Hbox’s rise and fails every time. In another, Hbox plays Thanos - the most “inevitable” of Marvel villains. In early 2019, Melee commentator Webs tweeted that “hgod only loses when he so chooses” and the Melee Stats team made a video essay about it.

Bobby Scar — the People’s Champion, the guy who coined the Five Gods terminology, one of the most booming voices in Melee — defined 2017-2020 as the era of “The Hbox Question,” with the question being, “who can [consistently] beat this guy?”

Before the rise of social media, recency was just a bias. Nowadays it’s a religion. So you may have forgotten just how centralizing Hungrybox was during his three-year reign as Rank One. From 2017 to early 2020, it felt like Hbox was at the center of every controversy, every discourse, every tournament, every year. 

Part of that feeling came from how Hbox won matches. When Hbox had the lead, he would choke the life out of your favorite player — or, if your favorite had the lead, Hbox seemed to compel them to choke. The watershed moment is EVO 2016, where Hbox does that to Armada in game 5 to get the reset and in game 10 to close it out. From thereon out, there’s a long list of sets and tournaments that end like this.

That is, up until February 2020 and Smash Summit 9. Summit 9 was the last moment Hbox would look unbeatable — but boy did he look it. He skated through Summit’s pools with a clean 15-0, no games dropped, neat 30’s over Hax, aMSa, Mang0, Fiction, and Plup. In Bracket, Plup had come in with a refined, new gameplan and was the only true challenge. He took a set in Grand Finals but Hbox closed it out.

On results alone, it would seem the Hbox Question still hadn't been answered. But if you were paying attention you could see a shake-up coming from the new guard — Wizzrobe, Zain, and Cody. These three players had honed the Puff matchup to the point where no Puff aside from Hbox stood a chance. They had optimized better against Puff (and Hbox) than anyone else in the Melee canon ever had.

Even more importantly, they did this on different characters, which gave Hbox fresh fronts to fight on. In the past, when players got good enough to run into Hbox consistently, they would switch to Fox to face him. Fox is (theoretically) Puff's worst matchup, so it makes sense, but it also meant that for years Hbox could primarily focus on Fox. Cody made the Fox front vastly more difficult for Hbox while Zain and Wizzrobe added Marth and Falcon atop that. (Not to mention aMSa’s Yoshi, Jmook/Ben’s sheik, or Llod/Trif’s Peach.)

In turn, the Hbox Question, which had stumped the old Gods and gatekeepers for years, was answered just like that by the rise of Zain and Cody. It caught a lot of people off-guard to the point where commentary on an Hbox set ranged from general incredulity, chalking it up to online (before LANs returned), or a lingering sense that Clutchbox would return.

It was also true that Hungrybox had become less… hungry. Not to say he didn’t want to win anymore, but in the past Hbox could only win on the CRT. At his peak, he wasn’t finding many wins in the court of Melee opinion (for reasons that have been talked to death and that TO/community leader Aiden covers well enough here). Nowadays, Hbox is the biggest streamer in Smash and has a large fanbase — he can win elsewhere, he doesn’t need to be unbeatable.

You could see the change in how Hbox approached the grind. Hbox was not usually a practice mode grindlord, but he put the work in by going to as many Florida locals as he could, in between as many majors as he could. This is an approach that fits Puff especially well, since it’s probably better to grind scenarios in neutral than it is combo routes.

“When I was number one, even after I won a major, the Monday I got back from a tournament I'd go to the Orlando Monday weekly,” he told me when we caught up at Genesis X2. “We had a line of locals with me, Plup, Mew2King, Wizzrobe, Colbol, and Gahtzu under one roof. It was actually wild. That’s like three of the top ten players in the world at that point, by the way. That's probably why I stayed on top for so long before Slippi, because I had constant warmth, constant warmth, and constant Melee in my fucking veins.”

His results never recovered from losing those stacked locals and the regimen they gave him, but I can’t blame Hbox for leaving it behind. If you’ve been to a local or a major, you know that this approach takes a lot of travel, time, money, and stamina. Much of the Melee old guard had worn themselves out on this grind.

Five years later, February 2025, my feeling was that I might never see Hbox win another Supermajor — and that would be perfectly fine. People age, priorities change, and a three-year stint at number one is more than enough to hang the crown on. Then, I went to Genesis X2 to cover the event for Team Liquid, and that feeling changed.

Hbox was dialed in to a point where it was difficult to get fifteen minutes for an interview. At one point a crowd gathered around one of his friendly sessions because he looked like he was fighting for his bracket life. When I got the interview, it was clear he really wanted to win this one. 

“A win would make me very, very proud. Like, second place would be nice, or third, God, if it has to be that way. But a win, especially over my demons [Zain, Wizzrobe, and Cody]…”

My feeling then was that, after five years, I might see Hbox win a supermajor that weekend.

Sure enough, everything fell into place. Hbox beat one of his demons in Wizzrobe, breaking a five-set losing streak. Mang0 beat Cody, Hbox beat Mang0, leaving Hbox to fight Trif, the world’s best Peach main in Grands. Since Peach is one of Puff’s easier matchups, it felt like the Hbox win was fated once more. 

Of course, this win isn’t the same as Summit 9 or even EVO 2016. Hbox dodged Zain (DQed) and Cody (Mang0ed), his other two silver bullets, and he’s no longer the question the rest of the top ten are trying to answer. This victory is its own moment, a brief return to an old feeling amidst a Melee scene that has fundamentally changed. It’s something even harder to earn than that Summit 9 win, or even his past Genesis 6 win.

Something that clearly had a bigger meaning to Hungrybox as well.

On some level, it’s nice this way too. More peaceful. About ten percent of the audience filters out when it’s clear it’s going to be a Puff-Peach Grand Finals but no one talks about this because it doesn’t matter. (I am a floaty evangelist and even I can’t blame them.) What little discourse that bubbles up feels like microwaved leftovers from 2019 and the true discourse of the day (controllers) will resurface again soon. 

Hbox won, but he’s not unbeatable again. I’m not sure he minds that.

“When you’re the underdog people get less angry when you win. I want to, like, win one event and then disappear for a few months, so people forget that I won it,” he laughs. 

Do you remember that three-year stretch where he was the question to answer? Do you remember those old summits? It’s okay if you forgot. They are in the distance now, and this peak would not mean the same if the last ones weren't so far away.