It’s Shameless Promotion Time!

I’m excited! This is because I can now officially really start promoting the Speed Demos Archive Charity Marathon! I’ve mentioned it before, but I can finally give you most of the details both relating to me specifically and the marathon in general.

The theme is “Classic Video Games” focusing on the NES, SNES and Genesis. The complete schedule as it currently stands is available here. It’s not quite final (Despite Mike’s claims), but there won’t be any huge changes from here until the marathon. The marathon starts at 6PM EST on New Year’s Day, January 1st, and goes until about 12:30AM EST on Monday, January 4th. All of my actual running occurs in the first 24 hours, ending with Marble Madness. The other four games I’ll be running are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, Rygar and Kung Fu (Not in that order). Interestingly, three of the five games will be race affairs–Kung Fu will be a 3-way race between myself, Daniel “Kareshi” Brown, and Freddy “Frezy_Man” Andersson (Who holds the current SDA run, Marble Madness is going to be a 2-player game with Andrew Gardikis (Who has the current SDA run) controlling the 2-player marble, and Battletoads will be a semi-reprise of Pianotoads, with the added element of another competitor in Pablo “DJ Mike Haggar” Bert (Who…actually doesn’t have the current SDA run in the format we’ll be competing in, although he does have the warpless run of the game).

“But Emptyeye!”, you’re saying, “Where can I watch this marathon?” Well, that’s easy–during the marathon, you can watch on the SDA main page, located at http://www.speeddemosarchive.com. You’ll actually see two camera angles–one focused on the TV running the game being played at the moment, and the second focused on the people commentating on the run. There will also be a chat powered by UStream. You can watch everything and follow along with the chat just by going to the SDA page when it’s time, but you’ll need to register a UStream account to actually participate in the chat.

“But Emptyeye!”, I hear you from the other side of my computer, “Why the heck would you do this?” How about for a good cause? As you watch, there will be a place where you can donate to charity, specifically CARE. CARE are an international charity dedicated to fighting poverty, especially (though not exclusively) as it relates to women. More specifically, rather than just throwing money at people as a quick fix, they try to eradicate the root causes of poverty in the third world–systemic discrimination, corrupt governments, social conflicts, etc. It’s a great cause, and it’s international too, which was important to SDA given the contingent of speedrunners who aren’t from the U.S.

So if you’re not doing anything over New Year’s Weekend, head over to SDA and check out some high-quality speedrunning on some of your favorite games of yesteryear.

-EE