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Marathon Poll Results! Tim Troppoli, Site Administrator July 25, 2010 I put a poll up two weeks ago asking you guys which Marathon you'd like to see next. Your choices were a revisiting of last year's Sonic the Hedgehog Marathon or a Banjo-Kazooie Marathon. More than 400 votes were cast and, despite the polls remaining neck and neck for much of the polling period, there's a clear winner. And that is... ...revisiting the Sonic the Hedgehog Marathon! With 219 votes, it captured 52% of the total, making it your choice for our next Marathon! Thanks for voting! This isn't to say we'll never do a Banjo Marathon-- it's certainly still a very real possibility. However, the idea may also be integrated into a larger "Rare-a-thon" featuring other games made by Rare to provide a little more variety. Who knows! I'm working on planning the Marathon now, including finalizing the list of games and putting up a banner contest. This should all be up sometime this week-- keep checking back for updates! Two quick notes: If you sent me an email during (or immediately following) the Pokemon Marathon, I likely haven't responded to it yet. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten you! I've just been extremely preoccupied lately and haven't gotten around to reading and responding to all of my emails. I sent out thank-you emails to all of the donors a while ago. However, some sort of error occurred while they were being sent out and I'm not sure if each email went through. If you donated and haven't received an email, please let me know via email. I don't want to forget anybody! One last thing-- I'm experimenting with a pseudo-commenting system where people can leave feedback regarding main site updates on the forums. Registration isn't required! We'd love to hear what you guys think about the site announcements so please consider leaving a comment or two below. Click here to comment on this update!

     

A Year of ExtraLives.org! Tim Troppoli, Site Administrator July 11, 2010 I remember drawing out both the site layout for ExtraLives.org and the video capture setup on a piece of looseleaf notebook paper over a year ago. At that time, I had no idea what would ultimately happen to the idea. Would the site ever go online? If so, would anyone ever watch our Marathons?  Half a dozen Marathons later, we have our answer. Throughout this past year we've raised $37,023.21, spent hundreds of hours playing video games and amassed hundreds of thousands of viewers. We've provided games, toys and books to children's hospitals through Child's Play, provided meals for hundreds, if not thousands, through the World Food Programme and worked to improve life for people in developing nations through UNICEF. Most recently, we've funded the construction of three schoolhouses through Free the Children in Ecuador, Kenya and most recently, Sierra Leone. This most recent Marathon was a revisiting of our first Marathon in order to celebrate the first anniversary of ExtraLives.org. It lasted about 78 hours. More than 87,000 of you from over 110 countries tuned in to watch us play with the total time spent watching equal to 2069 days, 6 hours and 29 minutes-- that's more than five and a half years! We raised $10,072.01 through this Marathon for Free the Children. The charity is able to build a schoolhouse with $8,500. Having surpassed that goal, we put up a poll and let you guys decide where you'd like to see the schoolhouse built and Sierra Leone won by a landslide. Not only will we build a schoolhouse there but we will also provide it with books, supplies and a school lunch program. What makes this Marathon unique is the absolutely massive amount of fanart you guys sent to us. So far, I've uploaded it all to a Flickr album which has nearly 150 pictures (and I've recently found a handful of other pictures that were sent to a different email address so I should be putting up a few more soon). Thanks a lot for all of the fanart, guys! It really made the Marathon enjoyable for everybody involved. Plus, I don't think I'll ever forget such gems as Carla the Gyarados, Yugel the Kadabra, GHOST (the gasstation Pokemon), Volcano Bakemeat or any of the multitude of other jokes you guys helped to create during the Marathon. I'd also like to give a special thanks to the people behind the pseudo-band Rock Tunnel for making us our first ever fan-song. It's entitled Bootknives of Satan and you can listen to it here. Just be sure to have the lyrics up-- you'll need them! Speaking of songs, if you missed my rendition of Trololo at the end, it's been uploaded on YouTube for your "enjoyment." Give it a listen here. As always, we really need to thank everyone who spread the word for allowing us to be so successful. Special thanks go out to the fine folks at Reddit for upvoting every post about us, NintendoLand for writing up a nice article about us and embedding the live Marathon feed, Marriland for also writing up a nice news article about us, Bulbapedia for featuring us in the news, Pokebip (which is a French site, oddly enough), GameMarathons.com and every other site that advertised the Marathon (sorry if we didn't include yours-- I can only look through site referral records and can't see if you linked directly to the Ustream page). I'd also like to thank everyone who posted it on various forums and social networking sites-- we couldn't have done it without you! Also, congratulations to all of the raffle winners! All of the shirts and prizes have been awarded and the winners have all been emailed. If you didn't win, don't fret-- any unclaimed prizes will be raffled off again. I will be emailing all of the donors shortly so I can put together the final list of donors-- don't worry, I haven't forgotten to thank all of you for your generous donations! Next on the agenda is planning the next Marathon. Before we all ship off to college in the fall, we'd like to have one more Marathon. This isn't to say that it's the last Marathon ever. However, I have no idea what will happen in college and for all I know it may be the last time the current ExtraLives.org team got together for a Marathon. So, here's the idea. There are a few Marathon ideas floating around right now. However, given the time we'll need to prepare we've got to limit them down to games that we not only know well but also games that we own. Here are our two best ideas: Revisiting the Sonic the Hedgehog Marathon. Yes, we did a Sonic Marathon in July of 2009. However, I always had feelings that it could have been improved with more games and the splitscreen format (after all, Sonic is about speed-- why wasn't there racing involved?). This would be the easiest Marathon for us to pull off but we just revisited a Marathon this month and I'm not sure if people would rather us not do it twice in a row. A Banjo-Kazooie Marathon. It'd include Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, Banjo Pilot, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts and Diddy Kong Racing (but you can only play as Banjo!). I think the length would be fine and that it'd be nice to dip a toe into a new game series but I'm not sure if this sort of Marathon would have a lot mass appeal or if it would be attractive to a more niche audience. I've put a poll up to see what you guys think. If you have any comments on the choices or would like to suggest something else (remember, if we don't have the games, chances are we won't be able to do a Marathon with them next month), email me at Tim@ExtraLives.org. We appreciate everybody's continued support. Thanks for helping to make a dream come true by causing ExtraLives.org to be so successful! We hope to see you at the August Marathon... whatever that is! (Also, thanks to Kwando1313 for letting me steal his forum avatar to replace the placeholder image-- it really highlights some of the best parts of the Pokethon).

Thanks for Everything! Tim Troppoli, Site Administrator June 15, 2010 Since the start of ExtraLives.org, we've raised nearly $27,000 ($26,951.20, to be exact). The last two Marathons, the Legend of Zelda Marathon and the 64 Hours of the Nintendo 64 Marathon, made up the bulk of that (over $22,000). These Marathons both raised money for Free the Children and have funded the construction and furnishing of two schoolhouses in developing nations-- one in Ecuador and one in Kenya. In addition to the fantastic framed photo Free the Children mailed me recently, they also made a video to thank us for our continued support. It features Free the Children co-founder, Marc Kielburger and the Canadian band Hedley. Check it out! We appreciate all of your continued support! We wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as we've been this past year without everybody's help. Thanks again for tuning in, watching the Marathons and donating-- here's to another successful year of ExtraLives.org!

 

Next Marathon Information! Tim Troppoli, Site Administrator May 30, 2010 Well, it's been a little while since I've last updated, but I've got some new details for the upcoming Pokémon Marathon!  First off, it's scheduled for Friday, July 2nd at 12:00 PM noon (Eastern Time). As is the case for most Marathons, the Marathon's length is not set in stone (though anywhere from 64 to 72 hours would be a pretty good guess). In terms of games, we'll be playing through all of the games that were played during the last Pokémon Marathon with one exception. Instead of playing Pokémon Blue alongside Pokémon Red, I've got my hands on a copy of Pokémon Green (it came all the way from the UK). For those of you who don't know, when the Pokémon games were originally released in Japan, the two versions were Green and Red. Green was then converted to the Blue version we all know and love when it was released in other countries. The version of Green I have is... well, very... unique. It is in English. Sort of. It's certainly an experience not worth missing out on so don't forget to tune in! In addition to that, we'll also be playing Pokémon Gold and Silver, as well as both Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire side-by-side. The final list of games isn't quite complete, but we're looking at including a few extra games, including Pokémon Snap, the Trading Card game, Hey You Pikachu!, and others. We won't be playing any DS games because we haven't found a good way to capture video from them very well. Plus, they're pretty long and that coupled with poor video quality would likely make for a pretty unappealing situation for everyone. I've come across some pirated Pokémon games in my travels and I'd like to include them somewhere in the Marathon as well. Remember the CDi and its interesting God-awful games from the Zelda Marathon? The pirated games will act as this Marathon's "CDi." If you have any bootlegged, pirated or otherwise non-official Pokémon games that you'd be willing to donate or lend to us for the Marathon, we'd love to have them! Send me an email at Tim@ExtraLives.org and I'll try to work something out. You may remember me mentioning contacting Nintendo regarding the company potentially donating some products to raffle off during the Marathon. Sadly, they denied my application (and I worked so long on it too...). I'm working on Plan B right now which involves getting some ExtraLives.org T-shirts printed up that we can raffle off. I'll post up more information about this when it's available. See the Pokémon Marathon banner up at the top? That was made by our art guy, Chris, who did another excellent job. Since there was no banner contest for this Marathon, there will be some opportunities for people to enter the raffle without donating throughout the broadcast. Be sure to watch the Marathon so you don't miss any opportunities to win! One more quick note: I'd just like to thank everyone again for tuning in and donating. I couldn't be more pleased with how much money we've raised. It's all thanks to you guys! To show their gratitude, the people at everyone's favorite charity, Free the Children, sent this to me in the mail: It's even hand-signed by a bunch of people who run the charity! Thanks again to everybody who has made our fundraising efforts so successful throughout the past year-- here's to another outstanding year of ExtraLives.org!