Bowser Challenge
The Bowser Challenge is a challenge in Super Smash Bros. Melee occasionally held as a side event at tournaments, consisting of one player fighting a team of three Bowser players on Fountain of Dreams with team attack off. The challenge was originally developed by the Superfriends crew of Southern California, and it was later posted by HugS on Smashboards in February 2005.
The Bowser Challenge, and its general idea of fighting a lumbering normally bottom-tier character while stacked against overwhelming odds, spawned an equivalent in Brawl called the "Ganon Challenge", as well as the Ganon Gauntlet in Apex 2012.
Rules
While some variants of the Bowser Challenge might include humorous rules for the Bowser team, such as "taunting or 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 Bowser team cannot feature a CPU in it. The players do not have to main Bowser, but they should be competitively competent with Bowser.
- Team attack is turned off.
- The challenger, as 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 Bowser is normally a notorious bottom-tier character with poor mobility and low attack speed, which renders him easily defeated by faster characters such as Sheik and Fox, facing three Bowsers at once on a small stage becomes a daunting task as the three Bowsers can easily cover most of the stage in hitboxes, thus giving the challenger very little opportunity to safely attack. As team attack/friendly fire is also turned off, the Bowsers can take on an extremely aggressive fighting style that will overwhelm the challenger, further hindering their ability to safely approach. As another complication, Bowser himself is difficult to KO; while Bowser ordinarily has a lackluster recovery that is very easy to edgeguard and gimp, the presence of two other Bowsers makes edgeguarding almost impossible, and Bowser's high weight makes him resistant to the upper blast line (where edgeguarding would be irrelevant).
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, Ken Hoang in his prime was unable to get a single KO in the challenge, and in the same tournament, Captain Jack, who came the closest to completing the challenge, only managed to get 4 KOs, as Ganondorf.
No record exists verifying a player as having won a legitimate 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.
