Last January in 2022 Kat and I held our first major online marathon on Twitch that spanned 3 days. Over 50 speedrunners participated.

In September of 2022, my dad very unexpectedly ended up passing away from cancer. I decided to use that as a pivot point for the next marathon we wanted to host in January and center the marathon around the Stollery. The Stollery is a children’s hospital located in Edmonton, Alberta.

We picked the Stollery as it’s a great local hospital aimed at helping sick kids with surgeries and illness.

Update:
Kat and I held Striking Cancer Out from January 27th – January 29th, 2023.

Our fundraising goal was $1000 and we ended up raising $2042.69!

This was the second major marathon that Kat and I hosted, and we honestly did a really good job. Over 50 different speedrunners participated again, but we had learned a lot from our last major marathon in January of 2022 of what to do and what not to do. Considering it was just Kat and me doing everything all weekend, and me in particular re-streaming everything on Friday and Sunday, we did amazingly well – as most of the time at worst the schedule was 10 minutes behind, but we were generally ahead the entire event. I had to place several bonus runs to fill in time, and balanced time extremely efficiently.

We received a huge amount of compliments on again how grassroots our events are. A large combination of smaller communities took part and regularly watched large portions of the marathon. Someone told me, a few weeks prior he had watched maybe 2% of GDQ, in comparison, watched over 60% of ours – which is fantastic. Our transition screens mostly had descriptions the runners themselves wrote, mostly verbatim, using their PB videos:

It was a really nice way to highlight the particular runner involved, and showcase their skill (we opted not to show off longplays or TASes so the skill represented in the transition video was directly 1:1 and equal to what the runner could perform in the run.) By far and wide, this received the most feedback. Both Kat and I enjoy holding events that are free from corporate sponsorships or involve money. One of the things I looked forward to the most when my account was new, was SNES Superstars. There was always a huge community turnout, and seeing everyone perform and explain their games was always like being a kid in a candy store to me. I feel our schedule offered a neat variety of popular, genuinely enjoyable and genuinely unknown as well.

Again, a big thank you to everyone who took part! Submissions were up this year from our previous event in January 2022. In 2022, we received about 60 total submissions– and in 2023, we received 118. Kat and I really appreciate the interest in our events. These events are a passion project for sure. 🙂

Feel free to check out the entire event which was archived on YouTube!