The Twitch streamer Cody “iBDW” Schwab is a Smash Bros. professional – and colorblind. With special glasses, he saw his game for the first time “properly” and was overwhelmed.
This is Cody Schwab: The streamer is regularly seen on Twitch playing “Smash Bros. Melee” under the name “iBDW”. He competes for the e-sports team “Panda”.
He joined the team in 2020 but has been playing Smash Melee at a high level for many years. His first tournament participations were already recorded in 2015. The unusual thing: For all that time, he hasn’t seen the game like everyone else because Schwab is colorblind and usually cannot see certain colors and shades, such as red.
But in a stream, he tried out special glasses that allowed him to see those colors that were unknown to him. And he suddenly saw his game of Smash Melee completely differently.
Special glasses allow streamer to see the colors
This is how the stream went: While many games today offer certain settings for colorblindness, Smash Bros. Melee, as an old game (2001), did not. In the stream, he ventured onto the stage “Fountain of Dreams”, which has a lot of pink tones. Just before the start, he says, “I think I can recognize FOD pretty well. I don’t think it’s much different for me.”
But shortly after the start, he cannot believe his eyes: “Wait – do purple and pink look like this? Wait… that’s NOT blue?” he comments, repeatedly taking off the glasses for comparison.
He wonders how the familiar stage looks – and apparently thought before that there was just a lot of blue there.
Since the original stream, he has continued to stream on Twitch and is rediscovering Smash Melee – or rather all the colors in the game. He comments on the outfits of the fighters and the stages, but also generally on the topic of colors.
In the meantime, he created a “Color Tier List” that he later shared on Twitter. There he ranks the new colors and shades in a favorites list, especially purple and red seem to have particularly caught his attention: “Purple and Red are sick,” he writes.
With the special glasses, Schwab can now apparently recognize colors in a much more nuanced way, even though he still emphasizes that he cannot see colors “perfectly.” Nevertheless, the viewers in the chat were excited about the streamer’s journey through a new world of colors.
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The title image is from a clip of iBDW on Twitch.
