About me
Hey what’s up. I’ve never done a blog post before so this will be a little different, but I figured most people don’t know who I am so this would be a nice place to talk about where I come from and my background within the smash community.
I’m Luca Gacy (Lab Rat), founder of ICEBOX Controllers. I grew up in Lafayette Colorado and just graduated with a BS/MS in electrical engineering from DU. I’ve been playing smash since I was about 10 years old. I first learned about it after playing brawl at a friend's house and thought I was a god because I could spam the shit out of tornado with Meta Knight. I also may or may not have thought Samus was a robot… anyways my brother and I got hooked and convinced my parents to buy it for us. We couldn’t afford a Wii so they ended up getting us a gamecube and melee disk from an EZ pawn for $20 each… different times. We didn’t have a memory card so every time we turned it on we would speed run classic mode and 100 man melee to unlock jigs, and falco. My brother, and good friend Anton were the OG squad and we played for years after that. We did end up getting a memory card at one point.
After getting my ass beat by my brother over and over, I wanted to get better so I started looking up strats and tech to give me an edge and watched a video about this thing called wavedashing. I got hooked on learning as much tech in the game and watched pretty much every tutorial on youtube I could find. Yep, I’m a tech skill fiend no fundies fox player and followed the natural progression to box controllers I know. This is where my tag comes from too.
After playing loads of melee three-for-alls we wanted to give brawl another shot at my friend's house. I remember watching some brawl sets on youtube and thinking that they looked similar in speed to melee. Nope it was awful and I got judged for suggesting it. I was confused and ended up going back to the video that I saw and noticed it said SSBPM. Turns out I was watching Project M (rip) not brawl. After thinking we broke my friends wii the first time it booted, we got even more obsessed with smash and my brother and I pretty much went over to Anton’s house every evening to play. Shout outs to Anton’s parents for the hundreds of dinners they gave us. I started out playing Lucario and then ended up switching to Lucas as my main; I promise this has nothing to do with the fact that both of them have my name in theirs. I discovered smashboards when looking for tech and was super active on the Lucas forum and posted any new findings I could. There a player named Miles noticed I was in Colorado and told me I should check a PM tournament called Wavedash Wednesdays in Denver. I convinced my group to go and feeling on top of the world prompt got 3-0d. And that was the first of many tournaments I went to. I was never very good, but my crowning achievement was getting 2nd place at a weekly and winning a clean $17. I even started a smash club at my highschool and convincing a bunch of my friends to pick up the game as well.
I ended up going to University of Denver for electrical engineering and put smash on hold after PM got Nintendo’d, but now I’m back and hope that I give back to the community that means so much to me. Thanks for listening to my progression of my smash experiences. I’ll have another blog post about my experiences with modding controllers through out but this one is long enough. Have a nice day!
Regards,
Luca Gacy