The black character glitch is a glitch in Super Smash Bros. Melee that allows the player to use an all-black character. It is a method of the Name Entry glitch, discovered by Exchord92.
Executing the glitch
First, set Friendly Fire to ON. Then, change the mode to team battle. Select all four contestants as the same character, and the same team. Next, perform the glitch by one of two methods:
Method one
Place the cursor of the player's controller over the name field on the character select screen. On this controller, press A and B simultaneously. Release A, but hold onto B. Scroll down to the "Name Entry" button. If the player presses A again at just the right time, the game will skip to the Stage Selection screen. Select the stage. If it loads properly, the game has not frozen and the glitch is successful.
Method two
Using two controllers, hover one cursor over the "Back" button and the other over the "Name Entry" button in the name field. Press A simultaneously on both controllers. The game should skip to the Stage Selection screen. If the stage selected loads up properly, the glitch is successful.
Playing the battle
After the player has started the battle, the player may fight with other human players. Note that any CPUs in the match will do nothing, as they have no opponents to battle. However, they'll still go after items they like, such as Poké Balls.
Explanation
The all black character glitch works because when two or more of the same character are on the same team, those same characters have to be the same color. To help identify who's who, the game has sub- colors it throws on these characters. P1 has no sub-color, P2 is lighter, and P3 is darker. Normally, there aren't supposed to be 4 people on one team, but in this case there is, so the game loads the next sub-color, which happens to be all black (there is also an "all grey" sub-color, only available through the debug menu).