Bowser Challenge

The Bowser Challenge is a challenge in Super Smash Bros. Melee issued mostly to advanced players in certain tournaments, consisting of one player beating a team of three Bowsers on Fountain of Dreams. The challenge was originally developed by the Superfriends crew of Southern California, and it was later posted by HugS on Smashboards in February 2005.

There is no well-known equivalent to the Bowser Challenge for other games in the series, though the concept would be simple to carry across: a fight against a team of the heaviest character on one of the smallest legal stages.

Rules

While some variants of the Bowser Challenge might include humorous rules for the Bowser team, such as "doing something of hilarity after KOing the challenger" or "pressing X, Y, X respectively on the results screen", the Bowser Challenge always features the following core set of rules:

• All players have 4 stocks, with the time limit being disabled.
• The Bowser team must be composed of three human players on the same team. The players do not have to main Bowser, but they should be of above-average skill; the Bowser team also cannot feature a CPU in it.
• Team attack is turned off.
• The challenger, on their own team, may use any character.
• The stage must be Fountain of Dreams, as it makes hit-and-run, camping, and spamming techniques unviable.
• Items are disabled.

The goal is for the challenger to defeat all three Bowsers, accruing 12 KOs in total, with self-destructs on the Bowsers' part also counting as KOs. The three Bowsers, meanwhile, must work together to prevent the challenger from reaching this goal.

Difficulty

While the match can seem to be in favor of the challenger, due to Bowser's poor mobility and low attack speed (especially against faster characters such as Sheik and Fox), the three Bowsers can easily cover most of the stage in hitboxes due to its relatively small size, thus giving the challenger very little opportunity to safely attack; as team attack is also turned off, the Bowsers can take on an extremely aggressive fighting style that is not seen in actual tournament matches, further hindering safe approaching by the challenger. As another complication for the challenger, Bowser himself is difficult to KO; while Bowser ordinarily has a lackluster recovery, the presence of two other Bowsers makes edgeguarding almost impossible, and Bowser's high weight also makes him resistant to the upper blast line.

Provided that the Bowser players are semi-competent, the Bowser Challenge is seen as being effectively impossible to win for the challenger, and its level of difficulty can be seen even amongst top-professional smashers. In one tournament, famed Melee player Ken Hoang was unable to get a single KO in the challenge, and in the same tournament, Captain Jack, who successfully defeated Ken's Marth in friendlies, only got 4 KOs, as Ganondorf.

No official evidence proves that a professional has won a Bowser Challenge. The current, verifiable record for the challenge is 6 KOs out of a potential 12, performed by A Rookie with Mario in one of Ken's livestreams on Twitch; this performance, however, was bolstered by 3 SDs from the Bowsers.

External links

• SmashBoards thread started by HugS
• Captain Jack's attempt, with 4 KOs
• Armada's attempt, with 5 KOs
• A Rookie's attempt, with 6 KOs (at 8:18:40)