2018-09-17: Big Bad Game-a-thon 2018

Well it happened again. Just like last year, I was staff for Big Bad Game-a-thon and it was a blast. In fact, it pretty much followed the same formula as last year: an amazing time marred by one technical hiccup in the first night.

I was involved a bit earlier in the process this time: I did promotion, run selection, developed the scripts I used last year into more proper tools this year. It was neat to be there to see a marathon begin to come together before the actual marathon day. Honestly it felt strange. I mean, I've had entire multi-billion dollar infrastructures on my back professionally, but for some reason as I was doing run vetting it felt like if I made a mistake it'd just singlehandedly ruin everything. Quite a different feeling. However the truth was we had ten people vetting runs, and a consensus among us on what got in, so it wasn't just me.

I did my usual night time host shift, as well as some helping mod, hype chat up, etc. I also had four runs for this one which I admit may have been a little too much. Still though, I feel like I did well enough and everyone seemed to really like what I put on, so I'm not going to complain. Even if I accidentally laid down a pretty terrible joke during my Hachiemon run, heh:

Looking back at last year's post, I marveled that our event hit 200-400 viewers when we were expecting 50. This year we got on the Twitch front page, and got write-ups from big gaming sites. We started the event at 1,600 viewers: four times our cap from last year. That number grew all weekend eventually capping out at 6,200 on Friday night. I was just floored, and so was the rest of the staff. Despite reaching viewing counts fifteen times our max from last year, chat was chill and we barely had to moderate at all. It was really surreal and really welcome too. I had 3,500 for my runs, which I believe is the biggest event I've run in, barely topping SNES Superstars at 2,900.

In truth I felt like I did less this year than last year. I didn't suddenly produce a solution to a tech problem that saved the event, I didn't cut highlights within 10 minutes of runs ending. I mostly hosted, modded, and was there. Still though, by the end I was a weird combination of drained and pumped; it's left me on a high that's lasted at least for all of today. Better yet, I supposed my support was noted because the core staff promoted me. I'm one of the five official marathon/channel admins now. What do I plan to do with this? I don't know yet. I want to arrange some mid-year events, and have some ideas, but they're in the works. I'll need to escape crunch time at work to implement any of them.

Twitch VODs are done and here. Youtube VODs are coming but those take time to process.

tags: personal, big_bad_gameathon