Abdulaziz “Hax$” Al-Yami, a lauded Super Smash Bros. Melee player, died last month. The details are murky, but it seems to stem from complications related to a prior suicide attempt last year. I won’t eulogize the man; I didn’t know him, and all I can really attest to is that he was a prominent player for Melee for many many years, notably being a shining example of the power of ergonomic controllers. To be quite honest, that’s about all the nice things I have to say, as my impressions were mostly negative. That’s not me being callous or cruel, just honest – like many, my major memory of Al-Yami was the very public downfall he had in 2021. After spending the better part of 3 months launching a bizarre harassment campaign against another player, William “Leffen” Hjelte, Al-Yami was banned from the vast majority of Melee events, a decision that would end up permanent. It is impossible to fully sum up that situation with any sort of brevity, so the best I can do is link you to my prior blog on the matter.
In the back of my head, I always had a feeling that there was something dark beneath the surface of this event, and eventually I was proven right. It has since mostly been scrubbed from the internet, but a close friend of Al-Yami wrote a desperate plea regarding his mental state around this time last year. A 2-week stay in a psychiatric ward following a long spiral would lead to a clinic diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a trait he allegedly inherited genetically from his father. I grappled with conflicting feelings upon hearing that revelation, as I found it impossible to view the situation without that critical context. When it was revealed in August that Al-Yami had made an attempt on his life, which left him an amputee, things had already spun far out of control for any one individual person or group to resolve the matter.
Suffice to say, many do not share my more nuanced view. If you dare to check social media, you may find yourself caught in the crossfire of an ensuing war regarding who is to blame for Al-Yami’s death, as if he was in fact murdered by someone tangible you could point to and shame on the internet. What you won’t see from any of these pigs – for that is what they are, squealing hogs who don’t give a single shit about the very real person that died – is an acknowledgement of the real culprit, which has been staring us in the face for some time. Ever since the revelation of his diagnosis, I found myself looking back into Al-Yami’s long public history online, which started in his teenage years all the way to his death. What I found is someone whose mental decline had slowly taken root as he aged into an adult, as bipolar disorder often does, leading to many instances of irrational, self-destructive behavior. Far from the scheming of a narcissistic mastermind, this history speaks to someone who was struggling, unable to cope, and using the uncritical admiration he earned online from his genuine talent at video games as a panacea that ultimately fed into the illness that was eating away at him.
There will be many who seek to martyr Al-Yami as someone who was publicly humiliated and shamed into suicide despite being totally innocent, and some who will be repulsed by the bad behavior while entirely dismissing that he had spent many years in a sustained mental health crisis. I’m of the opinion that the only way to truly respect someone’s life is to acknowledge the fullness of who they were, and not a facsimile churned out by hate machines. These reductive hero and villain narratives might get attention on social media but do a great disservice to a real human who died fighting something that he could not control and didn’t ask for, that consumed his life even as he appeared to be of sound mind.
There was a passage in the post that Al-Yami’s friend wrote regarding his state of mind that I believe bookends both halves of this story:
For Al-Yami, being “Hax$” clearly meant being a technical wizard at Melee, meticulously studying the game down to its molecules and dissecting it into a prism through which only he could see. This is embodied in the meme which became an important fixture to the “Hax$” brand: “20XX,” the distant year in a dark future where only high-tier characters played to machine-level perfection were competing at tournaments.
This half-scholarly half-shitpost mindset proved a fine veil over what was, truthfully, an obsessive strive for perfection. If Al-Yami had grown up (he was 14 when he first started competing in Melee) believing life and the game to be two sides of the same coin, a demerit on his knowledge was as serious as a threat to his life. At least, that’s the only way that could explain his years-long feud with fellow Melee legend William “Leffen” Hjelte.
Hjelte was hardly a force for good on the old Smashboard forums, not too dissimilar to the many unsupervised middle schoolers who barked online to satisfy the common teenage urge to be obnoxious. Insulting the rest of the board’s population for their inferior thought processes was like breathing air to Hjelte, and he spared no expense for Al-Yami either.
His words were not received well, to put it lightly.
Now you might say that I have cherry-picked out some comments from Hjelte that weren’t that bad, or that Al-Yami was merely lashing out after years of sustained insults. Neither is true, I assure you – Hjelte was crude and rude, particularly to his fellow countrymen, but they all have a very familiar, sneering logicbro archetype to them, talking about facts over feelings, rather than, say, someone’s character. The inciting incident that Al-Yami mentions in his post above is, in fact, the very same post from Leffen you see right before that image, originally posted a few months prior. ‘Misinformed’ and ‘close-minded’ hardly seem like the type of jabs that would facilitate calling someone a future serial-killer, mentally unstable, or a response with “ridiculous amounts of unnecessary violence and anger”. I find one particular line quite telling: Al-Yami insists that Hjelte likes to call out why people ‘fail at life’ over attacking their arguments.
Indeed, Hjelte did frequently call people bad at the game, a common complaint against him, and one I do find unnecessarily rude and obnoxious, a Leffen trademark. What is difficult to see, however, is any notable instance where Hjelte’s childish insults rose to the level of telling Al-Yami that he was pathetic at life, as implied. Let’s revisit what Al-Yami’s friend had to say:
It is difficult to look back at these unreasonably angry forum posts – the personal attacks, the constant conflating of game knowledge to worthiness as a person, and so on – and not see that what was a flippant and cutting remark about game knowledge was an immense personal attack to Al-Yami due to an unhealthy hyper-fixation on his ability to play the game. So intense was this fixation that it would spawn a years-long spiral in which Al-Yami would characterize these kinds of posts as “stalking” and “harassment” of the highest order.
It’s important to note, too, that I have little doubt that Al-Yami truly believed this. After all, he was experiencing signs of what he would characterize as “PTSD”: insomnia, depression, and an inability to think of Hjelte without being medically triggered. As far back as 2015, Al-Yami was posting publicly about how his insomnia was so bad that he was awake for 72 hours straight at tournaments, a condition he blamed on Hjelte “stalking” him. At the same time, he was so hyper-fixated on Melee that he was playing fifteen hours a day while guzzling ibuprofen because he had developed arthritis – at just 21 years old – from using the infamously junky Gamecube controller. His brain apparently never stops thinking, never lets him get a moment’s rest.
I think Al-Yami’s bipolar disorder was blooming as he finished adolescence, rather than his initial characterization of PTSD. Insomnia, depressive cycles, and hypomanic fixations are all common symptoms of the illness. Hyperfixation and rumination are also fairly common symptoms of bipolar disorder, manifesting in both types of mood cycles. Ruminating, in particular, tends to occur in depressive cycles, and is often characterized as an unsettled mind that continuously loops back to prior events to obsessive degrees. The fact that, nearly ten years later, Al-Yami would continuously cite these forum posts as traumatic incidents in his life, so much so that he would make literal hours of video content about them and endlessly repeat the same talking points over and over for years afterwards, was likely a sign of such ruminating thoughts.
As his playing career began to initially grind to a halt because of his injuries, even more erratic and reckless behavior emerged in the desperate attempt to get back in the game. There are no less than three different hardware engineers and consultants working in ergonomic fighting game controllers that ran into the same pattern: Al-Yami approaches about the product, playtests a demo, immediately demands partnerships and equity for his consultation, doesn’t get exactly what he wants, then bails onto a new engineer, prototypes and plans from his previous debacle in hand ready to share because there are no patents or contracts involved. Al-Yami was not a hardware engineer, he was not an ergonomics expert, and he had very little capital to invest in R&D, being a high-school graduate who never held a real job. Yet continuously, for what appeared to be no discernible reason, Al-Yami demanded that his legacy and name be front and center for any of these products, despite not even coming up with the name for his aforementioned product:
The last engineer was smart enough to hook him to a contract so he couldn’t do the same maneuvers as before, and it was litigated before a court. Even under oath, Al-Yami has a difficult time reconciling with the fact that he had partners in these endeavors who did the lion’s share of the work. There was a brief time the court records and transcripts of Al-Yami’s questioning were put online, and they show complete nonsense answers regarding the incongruities.
When he first contacted the company Hitbox, there was a phrase that kept recurring as he tried to explain to them that he needed a major partnership with their company after 2 and a half days of testing their demo product:
“A second lease on life”. Maybe said in good-natured hyperbole, but let’s return to what his friend Darkgenex said one more time:
Like a dying man trying to find water, Al-Yami sought to preserve him playing Melee again, and even the narrative of how that came to be, at all costs. For no real reasons he continuously burned bridges with sympathetic hardware engineers, and would baselessly accuse Leffen of conducting some type of espionage in order to “kill his career” by trying it out. A grand narrative, of world importance, what some would call a delusion, was built to hold up the fragile truth that unless Al-Yami could be seen as a major contributor to Melee, he had no life to live. And he was willing to act in erratic, alienating ways in order to keep that delusion alive.
This may come as a surprise, but all of the events described up to now are prior to the release of his “Evidence.zip 2” video, in which he accused Hjelte, a longtime choice for his obsessive rumination, of committing crimes such as conspiring to accuse someone of sexual exploitation of a minor, and that he was a Hitlerian menace bent on destruction who needed to be destroyed. Some months after the release and the initial wave of endless reinterpretation and (self-admitted) “PR” apology videos, Al-Yami would admit that during the course of making “Evidence.zip 2” he was drinking heavily – another recurring fact and a common side-effect of severe mental health issues – and that a psychiatrist had determined that he was in a state of psychosis when he was rushing out those videos.
Much has been made of the fact that Al-Yami was banned from most major NA Melee tournaments for the release of those videos. I don’t personally think there’s much to relitigate there – it is generally considered uncouth and extremely damaging to make baseless claims of illegal behavior of another player, and that level of harassment has almost always never been allowed. And while I believe his psychotic state mattered in describing the context, actions have consequences, and ultimately the responsibility of managing symptoms of mental health crises landed on him.
As we now know, the sobriety and psychiatric care necessary to soothe those symptoms was not consistent enough to stave off the worst outcome. Despite being told that he could attend local tournaments again after being banned, Al-Yami would once again make videos accusing Hjelte of crimes after he was privately warned, even past a first warning, to not do so again. Feeling they had no choice, his local organizers reinstated his ban, at which point his health spiraled to its lowest point. Months of drinking, psych ward stays, and harassment of local TO’s would ensue, even as many tried to help him break the cycle. One year later, he would be dead.
First and foremost, dying at the age of 30 after countless mental health struggles is a tragedy that is difficult to put to words. Even worse, it is a story that is heard all too commonly amongst those who do suffer from severe mental health crises – the years of uncertainty, years lost to hazy dissociative fog, countless burned bridges and broken hearts. Al-Yami needed help, and we are slowly being made aware that there were so many kind people who did try to privately help him through these crises of his own making. Yet cruelly, overcoming a mental health disorder is both something you can’t do alone and yet, paradoxically, can only be overcome by you choosing to change, to recognize that it must be done.
But of course, instead of trying to better understand the horrible disease that he was afflicted with without his consent and that drove him to destructive habits, the conversation has almost entirely been focused on “who” killed Al-Yami. As if his mental health crisis was inflicted on him only recently and not something he’d clearly been struggling with for nearly a decade. As if there is a logic to his actions that could be easily understood as sober and calculating.
I’m sure I’ll be accused of it anyways, but I’ll state for the record that it is not my intent to smear a dead man, a dead son, a dead brother. One of the sickest aspects of something like bipolar disorder is that it has many quiet sufferers, who toss and turn in bed as their brains simply overwhelm any natural defense they have. We have medications that help, but they are both lifesavers and not good enough – the effort necessary to sustain any degree of normalcy is far too great to be asked of any one person, and yet they must persist. Many sick people are aware that they are sick, as Al-Yami frequently alluded to, but have no way to cope with the pain and the shame. Those flaws don’t make him weak, or a bad person; it makes him achingly, horribly human.
In better times, it was clear that Al-Yami was an enthusiastic and fun person to be around, and there was genuine appreciation for his talents, and real innovations in the community that were advanced by dedicated people like him. I have no doubt that the nice things people are saying after his death are true, and my goal is not to take away from those memories or say they aren’t part of the person that was Abdulaziz Al-Yami. But it is important to understand that, more than good or bad, his life was complex and full of the contradictions and tragedies that make up all human life, not just fodder for culture vultures who are more interested in a political agenda than telling the truth.
And that truth is that believing that only Melee tournaments could have saved his life is the behavior of an enabler. Believing that his mental health problems were rapid and onset is the behavior of an enabler. Not acknowledging that he suffered from bipolar disorder is the behavior of an enabler. Enabling hurts everyone, and the only way to break that cycle is to see it for what it is.
There has been endless discourse about the state of men’s mental health, and how it isn’t taken seriously and/or ignored. So I’ll end by asking this – in what way does diminishing the harm of the very real mental health disorder Al-Yami suffered from help men’s mental health? How does flattening Al-Yami’s life into a 3 year period after years of symptoms help men’s mental health? What does harassing people who did their best under extremely difficult circumstances do to help men’s mental health?
Them's fighting words!! 
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