Marathon Gamers

With our last marathon now over, we here at Marathon Gamers are trying to come up with some new ideas to keep the viewers interested in between the marathons. So with myself and some addition streamers, we are hoping to be able to keep our TwitchTV channel as active as possible, the plan is to have at least every Friday covered by someone and random times throughout the week Live as well. Along with the more active stream, we are going to be trying to upload as much content as we can to our new YouTube page which is still currently being designed, we are going to be uploading anything from gameplay, commentaries, and of course clips from the marathons.

Back onto the recent event, all prize winners will be receiving an email sometime by the end of the week asking for more details on how and where to ship their prize, so be on the lookout!

We did it!!! It’s not a day after our event had ended, and we are all still recovering from the event. We gamed for a massive 103 hours, 28 minutes, and 21 seconds. Donations are still open and we will continue to take donations until November 12th, though only donations taken until this upcoming Saturday will be put into the drawings for prizes, so if you would like a chance to win something make sure to donate before October 22nd.

I’d like to give a huge thanks to ThinkGeek for all of the prizes that we are giving out. TwitchTV for promoting and putting us on their front page during our event. And also our local news station for pushing our story throughout the weekend, without the help of communities and businesses like these we would not be able to accomplish what we have so far, and we plan on only going up from here on.

We are just about to reach the end of day 2 and we have decided to switch it up a bit on how we do prizes. This year we will be giving a chance to everyone who donates (at least $5). So everyone who donates throughout the marathon will be put into drawings we will be having at the end of the marathon for all of the prizes. Though we will be having some special donation hours in which a certain donation will give you a special number of entries.

If you are an Alan Wake fan, we have just begun that game after completing Dead Space AND Dead Rising 2.

We aren’t sure yet of when we will be doing the Dance Central tournament, but there will be a blog post about it well before we begin, so stay tuned!

We are just not getting started with the second day of four in our marathon and so much has already been accomplished! CBS42, the local Birmingham station has been airing stories of our event the past couple days, we will be uploading them to our YouTube account once we are able to get them from CBS. Along with the news stories, we are also being blogged about on our college’s news page. Some other things to note that we have done, or have setup as goals are below.

~BioShock was beaten earlier this morning.
~Dead Rising was beaten last night.
~Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare was beaten earlier today.

~We are currently going through Dead Space and then going into Dead Rising 2 once it is completed.

~$700 total donated and the gamers will be doing the Monster Mash.
~$5,000 William will be dying his hair blonde.

Along with these we are also getting ready to give away our first prize to a lucky donor, so go ahead and send in those donations for a chance to win. A $5 minimum will get you one entry into the prize drawing.

We are now 10 hours into the marathon and we have already reached $600 in donations, which is an amazing start towards our goal of $2,500! We are all getting ready for the first night shift, which is always a joy to be a part of. At the moment we are grinding our way through BioShock, we have already beaten Dead Rising and are almost done with Doom 2.

We have some set goals past our original goal that we have setup, in which some of the gamers will be doing some awesome challenges. If we reach $5,000 one of the gamers will dye his hair platinum, and another will go black/blue when if we reach $7,500.

We also have some prizes setup tomorrow to be given away to those who have donated, and possibly a couple to give out to select viewers as well!

With just 17 hours left until we kick off the 100 hour marathon, things are all coming together! We finally got the prizes in from ThinkGeek (huge thanks to them!), and we have a couple new partnerships that are now flourishing. One huge update is that TwitchTV have been promoting our event, and will be putting the stream up on their front page throughout the marathon. As well as the front page, they have made us a partner on their site, which means we will be streaming in a much higher quality, and viewers will be able to chose the quality as they watch, to better deliver to those with high or low connection speeds.

Another great partnership we have made over the past week is with Freshest Network, a gaming community/competitive ladder that accepts gamers from all places. They have been running a special on their site in which gamers who donate to Marathon Gamers will receive free tickets on their site which go towards using their tournament system.

We are hoping this will be the biggest event yet, and that in the future we will go bigger and better, but for now we will be focusing on having the best marathon we can! We hope to hear from everyone during the event and can’t wait to start talking to those of you who we have made friendships with from past events.

~Josh

PS – My grandfather got results on a scan back this morning, his tumors have shrunk by 1/3. This is GREAT news for my entire family, as it means he will now be going in remission

We are all so excited we are less than two weeks away from the marathon! We just finished doing are final test before we begin the 100 hours and everything runs smoothly in our new room. We are still scheduling some events to hold during our marathon, so stick around for updates about the special events!

Some thanks goes out to ThinkGeek and Justin.TV for helping us out, ThinkGeek is setting us up with some amazing prizes, while Justin.TV will be helping us promote our event!

Another nice hefty batch of updates have been done to the site in the past week. We have finally added the donation widget to the side of the site, so we are now ready to take in donations, which is great news! We are still working on the page to show the stream, if production on the page isn’t completed by the time we start the event then the current setup will have to do, which you can check out by clicking “The Stream”. You may have noticed the addition to the first supporter on the list, KSI Global, they are a long time supporter of Marathon Gamers and we thank them for all they have done for us in the past, and hope the relationship continues to grow.

In the near future we will be announcing the YouTube page and some new functionality with the website and our events, so stay tuned!