This weekend, something incredibly special happened.Sarcastic Gamerhosted the world’s firstExtra Lifeevent — a worldwide gaming marathon raising money to fight pediatric cancer. Destructoid was part of the festivities and in the city of Manchester, Wardrox and I invited you to watch a live feed of The SingSterling Challenge — twelve consecutive hours ofSingStar, with a potential further twelve if a target was met.
Sadly, even with money donated from theDamnation/Rise of the Argonautsdev team, we didn’t quite the hit the mark. Time was against us — we came into Extra Life late, and one week of mine was spent in Tokyo so I couldn’t promote it. However, we did manage to raise $3000, while Extra Life itself netted over $100,000! Woot!
In other news, SG’s Doc tells me that, following the announcement of the SingSterling challenge, other members of the Dtoid readership took part in Extra Life and raised their own funds. As a collective, we probably more than made $5000 together, and that’s great.
We are currently working on producing a video package of the event, including some mini-interviews conducted with my slowly dying self throughout the night. That should hit later in the week. Until then, I’d like to share a few words of thanks, so hit the jump for that, if you are so inclined. Oh, and we’ll do better next year!
I’d like to thank:
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who watched the live feed and gave running commentary of the evening with such enthusiasm and (that word again) support. At any one time, we had over 100 viewers and I imagine that, with turnover factored into it, we had a lot more watching overall. It was your swaying of cellphones as if they were lighters on webcam, your excited all-caps declarations of “YES” when you heard us selecting a song you wanted, and the story of you all singing along toYMCAeither on the feed, in IRC or over Xbox Live that helped make this whole thing what it was.
Wardrox will tell you, at least every five minutes I was checking up on you guys, wanting to know if you were enjoying yourselves. If we couldn’t raise the high amount I asked for, then the least we could do was have fun. According to the reports, fun is what you had. I can’t say fairer than that.
Every now and then, in any job, you get doubts. You wonder if you’re in the right place. Then a bunch of people get excited about you singingTake On Meafter eight hours of SingStar and you realize you have the best job in the world. So thanks for that, too.
