If anyone hears the words “video game store,” they might immediately think of GameStop. However, there is a less well-known video game store that has retro written all over it. FX Game Exchange is a small store located near Madness Games on Custer Rd. While it primarily sells and trades games and consoles, the store also has special events in store for the consumers.

FX Game Exchange hold a variety of events from Madden to Halo to Call of Duty. However, their most famous tournaments are the Smash Brothers tournaments. Every Thursday night, the store hosts a Project M tournament called Infinity and Beyond. It starts at 8 PM and can go all the way until 3 AM, usually with 30 to 50 gamers. Every other week on Saturday, they also hold a Melee tournament named Smash Melee Bi-Weekly. Finally, their most notable event for the Smash Bros is their dime tournament called Dehydrated Ichthyoid Melee Extravaganza.

“Usually for our dime tournaments or melee tournaments, we’ll have a lot of guys,” Trey Fondren, the owner of FX Game Exchange, said. “We had a gentleman come from Seattle, Silent Wolf, and he’s one of the top players in the U.S.”

Silent Wolf, according to meleeiton.me, is ranked 16th best player in the world in 2013 SSBM Player Rankings. In the same rankings, two other regulars ‘Toph’ and ‘Wobbles’ were ranked 95th and 8th best player in the world, respectively.

“A lot of people that play in the Melee are pretty good,” Fondren said. “But anybody can come in and play.”

Senior Callahan Porter has been to the store and participated in the Project M tournament.

“There’s a lot of people at this tournament usually,” Porter said. “I got trashed by older gamers that were a lot better than me.”

He progressed to the second or third round as the character Marth.

“The game is really fine tuned and everyone is really into it and hyped,” Porter said. “It was pretty interesting. It’s a really loud area and you can really feel the charisma in the air. It seems like a really good store.”

Tournaments are not the only things that happen in FX Game Exchange. A YouTube channel called TourneyLocator also comes to the store to film its livestreams. Bill Wettingfeld, also know by his tag name ‘Bwett,’ is one of the gamers that run the channel.

“There aren’t many gaming stores that we can actually use for something like this and this is a very personal place,” Wettingfeld said. “It’s really nice and so whenever we came here, he was very open to the idea of having tournaments here.”

He discovered the store a few years back. Ever since then, the store improved their internet and ‘Bwett’ started doing livestreams.

“This is a wild idea,” Wettingfeld said. “But we kept coming here. We started just moving on and going.”

The tournament is recommended for people who love fighting games and want to give the series a try before adding it to their own collection. It’s also a good place to be to learn tactics and the Smash characters a bit better, or just to make friends with the same interests.

“Come, have some fun and don’t be afraid,” Wettingfeld said. “The Smash scene is one of the most friendly scenes out of any of the competitive games. Just play some games. And if you think you’re better than everyone else, now’s the time to show your battle.”