with preNASA now over, i did some reflection on the state of speedrunning marathons. (i'm afraid i wrote a lot of nothing however, sorry.)

there are at least 2 speedrunning marathons every single weekend this year if you check the horaro.org calendar. the only time no other events are taking place is during GDQs and ESA. every single community, game, and individual seems to need their own marathon for whatever reason.

one the one hand this is cool because it shows the community is active. putting on a marathon is not as difficult as it's been made out to be, and people aren't afraid to host their own on a whim. more live events have been established such as NASA or deucecon, and many more regional specific marathons have started up such as no reset in Montreal, RTA in japan, bourg la run in France, brazilians against time, PAX Australia, etc. and more game/community specific marathons have been happened such as RPG limit break, best of NES, metroid marathon, kirby showcase, various zeldathons, shot's fired, rayman marathon, etc.

on the other hand, there are so many marathons now that it's difficult to find a time to bring the community together into one event except for GDQs and to a somewhat lesser extent during ESA. you cannot host a marathon without interfering with at least one other event.

the more successful events are ones that either provide an alternate to GDQs like ESA or RPGLB, or are sub-events in support of it, such as JRTA. although community-specific marathons seem to do better than just for fun ones, they don't outdo the GDQ-focused events in terms of viewership or donation raising. it's not really surprising.

i'm not even sure how you could change up the typical marathon format to make it more interesting as a breakaway from the typical format. a few ideas i've tossed around is a marathon with no schedule, it's just whomever is around and wants to run goes next. another idea is having several live events at once that rotates between events being on stream so that it's always prime time for where the runner is at, thus eliminating the need for any graveyard shifts. another is a schedule that is chosen completely through bid wars with only the first few games being run without being donated for. whatever game is left to be offered with the most money donated goes next, alphabetical order.

preNASA was a good example of the issues described above. firstly, we moved it several times to try and not interfere with other marathons like JRTA, shot's fired, dreamhack winter, and yet still we had getting folks there 3, sunshine for veman, speedrun 2 change the world, bourg la run, and castles done quick all that same weekend. we then pretty much followed the GDQ style hosting format since we were raising money for the hotel venue costs and had mediocre at best numbers both in terms of viewership and donations, falling behind the GDQ-focused or charity-driven events that weekend as has been the trend. it's worth discussing if holding a fund raising marathon again would be worth it, as other avenues for raising funds for the hotel space might prove more fruitful.

whatever the changes or niche the marathon has going for it, i think the speedrun community as a whole needs to begin to come together to host more meaningful events. whether it be by region, console, game series, or you just want to attend GDQs or whatever, there is definitely a marathon to join and be a part of rather than trying to create your own. we'll accomplish much more together than we will separately, since as of right now it's hard to keep up with so many marathons every weekend.

i'd like to know your thoughts on speedrunning marathons, please respond