I've said it a few times already, but I'll repeat it here-- Mini-Marathons were an experimental idea from the start. Nobody knew if they'd have the same appeal as our traditional Marathons, nor if we'd actually meet our goal.

The broadcasts ran every Friday night in October, making for a total of five Mini-Marathons. During those 53 hours and 25 minutes, we featured on the Ustream homepage twice (so whenever someone would visit Ustream, our program would play automatically). We recieved 27,712 views, a new record for us, over the course of these broadcasts. The total time viewers spent watching us was over 157 days!

The Mini-Marathons consisted of nine games, including: The Oregon Trail, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Pikmin, Shaq-Fu, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, Superman 64, and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

We not only met our $500 goal for the World Food Programme, but exceeded it, ultimately raising $600. That's equal to 2,400 meals for starving people worldwide!

If you missed any of the Mini-Marathon and you'd like to re-watch it, it's all been recorded and can be viewed here (provided Ustream didn't eat any of the recordings when the feed crashed). I'll be standardizing all the titles for the recordings, so don't worry if they seem a little unorganized now.

With school starting up again, there hasn't been a whole lot of time for a full-fledged Marathon. We simply can't set aside 48+ hours to playing video games anymore. However, I hate seeing the site go so long without any updates or new broadcasts...

...which is why I'm introducing the concept of Mini-Marathons! 

These would entail selecting a charity and setting a donation goal for the entire month. Then, once a week for anywhere from 9 to 12 hours, broadcast a game. We may play one game per week, or if it's longer, play the same game for multiple weeks. At the end of the month, the time spent playing would be comparable to that of a full-length Marathon.

Starting Friday, August 21st (at 12:00PM, UTC -4), we'll be playing through a bunch of Mario RPG games, including Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. All money raised for this Marathon will be sent to UNICEF!

Only problem is... we needed a banner. It was clear my cringe-inducing MS Paint banner had to go, so we let you guys make us some banners, then vote on your favorites. And the winner is...

...KARL, with 27% of the vote, just 3 more votes than the the second place entrant, Hellogoodbye, who got 25%. Using some middle-school algebra, figure out how many people voted! His banner is below.

And the rest of the submitted banners are here-- thanks to everyone who entered!

Back in 1991, Sega invented Sonic the Hedgehog to fight against Nintendo's popular mascot, Mario. Nearly two decades later, Sonic the Hedgehog has a new purpose-- fighting against world hunger!

Thanks to everybody who tuned in to watch us play through the Sonic the Hedgehog series! Your generosity resulted in us raising $1,050 for the World Food Program! That's equal to 4,150 meals for starving people around the world! Not only did complete the nine Sonic games we promised we'd play, but we also threw in a tenth game as a bonus-- Sonic 3D Blast! The entire ordeal took more than fifty-two hours, but it was well worth it. If you missed any of the Marathon, or just want to relive the experience, you can watch the recordings of the event on our Ustream page.

Of course, there'd be little point in playing these games unless people were watching. Fortunately, 8,646 people (from nearly 70 countries) tuned in from the start of the Marathon on July 24th to its end on July 26th. When put together, you guys watched us a total of 4,475 hours and 53 minutes! It was the viewers that kept us going when the Sega Genesis cartridges refused to play or we died yet again in Sonic '06.

We had a few technical snags along the way, but my four year old laptop can only do so much when it's running at 100% capacity for dozens of hours at a time. It seems one gigabyte of RAM is not nearly enough when the broadcast process is eating up nearly 700k of it... I really appreciate your patience, especially when we had to go offline for a little while and reboot the feed.