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Most of this has been discussed on IRC already but I was asked to post here so. So anyway, zelda420 finished about an hour ago. We started at 9am EST and finished at 1:13am EST, so the total time for all four games was 16:13. Props to Ani and Jiano, especially Jiano who ended up having to run OoT in addition to the two he was already going to when Runnerguy and pokey couldn't. Both of them did excellent jobs; Wind Waker was finished in ~7:16, Twilight Princess in ~4:10, Ocarina of Time in ~1:38, and Majora's Mask in ~2:20. I'd say it was a pretty huge success by anyone's standards, considering nobody had even thought of this a week ago and it was all done on a few days' notice. I didn't expect there to be more than 20-30 viewers, but we ended up with about 210 at the peak when Wind Waker was finished, and stayed above 150 for TP and OoT (dropped a little below for MM). If you missed it it was all recorded, and the videos can be found here (http://www.ustream.tv/Zeldaspeedruns/videos).

It wasn't a success in all aspects though, and there are a lot of things we should have done differently. First off, the way we associated with Zelda448 wasn't really the best. It's kinda like "hey we saw you guys are doing a marathon so we decided to completely obliterate yours in our own marathon which we're going to be hosting at the same time". ZSR doing marathons is a great idea, but we need to be respectful to other marathon runners; we're not out to make enemies here. Maybe we could have mentioned that 448 inspired us, but I don't know how much more would be a good idea, considering we weren't even playing by the same rules. Hosting our marathon at the same time as theirs was definitely not a good idea, it potentially detracts attention from their stream among other things. Ani suggested we go to their stream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-2nd-4-48-zelda-marathon) and support them for the rest of their marathon which isn't a bad idea. Let's hope there's no hard feelings for this whole mess.

Additionally, 420 was not very well planned out. Particularly it turned out that Runnerguy's stream wasn't working (which nobody figured out until Jiano was halfway through Twilight Princess), so we all scrambled for a bit and decided to try to get pokey to run OoT. pokey started after Jiano finished TP, but his stream kept cutting out, so we didn't really have any other option than to have Jiano run OoT as well. One person doing three games is ridiculous and definitely shouldn't happen again (major respect to Jiano for that, though). We need to have all technicalities sorted out beforehand so things like this don't happen; preferably in the future we won't have one person playing more than one game. Additionally, the short notice meant we didn't have much time to advertise. If we broke 200 viewers with nothing but a few YouTube videos imagine what we could do with more time. I'd also dispute the timing of the marathon. I'm gonna guess that most of our viewers are in the United States and Europe. When Jiano was playing through Majora's Mask, it was pretty late at night in the United States and very early morning in Europe, which probably explains why the viewer count was dropping so low in the middle of the best run of the marathon. I don't know what would be better though really, but starting a few hours earlier sounds good.

So the runners themselves were outstanding, the marathon itself was a huge success, it's mostly just the behind-the-scenes stuff that needs working on (well, that Runnerguy/pokey thing wasn't quite behind the scenes, but oh well). We need to go about discussing how we'll do the next one so things go more smoothly.

I should have stayed up longer yesterday to watch more of the marathon, but I was too lame and went to bed early. But it seems like TP, MM and OoT all went well, except for the technical issues. You rock Jiano.

I agree with all you say about 4/48. I was checking both the marathons for awhile. And that we had about 200 viewers when the others didn't have more about 20, made me feel a little bit bad. We stole the viewers from them. Some came to their chat to post a link to 4/20 saying like "Hey, they kick your butts", which was really a bad thing.

Would it be a good idea to have someone that's focusing on commentating? As it's not easy for the runner to focus on the game while still reading the chat, answering questions and commentating the game. Ani did a pretty good job at it I suppose, being annoyed to having to answer the same question over and over again ;D. I don't know if Jiano did any commentating or such, but I presume he did.
I tried my best to answer questions in the chat while I was active, but it would be easier if someone was speaking as people are often spamming the chat so it's hard to see if you question has been answered.

Even though the 3D games are the most popular ones, I still think we should include more of the games in another marathon. 16 hours of marathon is really short to be honest and we could easily beat all the Zelda games in under two days.

I'm looking forward for another marathon at least!

lemme think

we needed 15 hours and like 40 minutes for the 3D games without the time we wasted with the streaming problems

so how long would the others take?

Zelda I: 0:45
Zelda II: 1:20
A Link to the Past: 1:50
Link's Awaking: 0:07/1:45 (we should discuss, wheter the warp glitch or dog house glitch are allowed or not)
Oracle of Ages: 2:20
Oracle of Seasons: 2:20
Minish Cap: 2:30
Phantom Hourglass: 4:00

so alltogether it's 16:50

means, an all zelda marathon should aim for sub 35 hours

If you guys want to discuss the whole outcome when i get home im more then happy to help with setting things up next time.

Im also going to try my best to learn Oot/MM so not all the pressure is on Jijo

Are those times including the credits, Grunz?
ALttP should be at least 10 minutes shorter, LA 20 shorter depending on what version you are using. Ages can't be beaten that fast, 2:45 for a SS with save warps OoS with save warping is at least sub 2 hours.
Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures should also be included, adding up another like 4½ hours to the time.
So at least 40 hours for all games.

Your missing ST, unless you guys dont want to count that

In addition, I think it would be best in the future to select our own charity/organization to have donations go to. Something that means something more to us. And have a way to track how much is raised. I seriously think our marathons could be the type that get 1000's of views after seeing what was done yesterday on such short notice. I don't remember a lot of "OMG HAX" type comments. It seems that people were interested in seeing the games be broken as much as possible.

Having one person per game and having multiple backups for games is a must. You never know when a person on the internet just isn't online for whatever reasons (emergencies, internet problems, etc.) It was bad that Jiano had to run OoT. I take a lot of blame since I had tested the stream the day before and it did the same thing, but just hoped it would be better like it was on Sunday. I'm sure MM wasn't as fun as it would have been had it been his only game.

If it's another ~16 hour marathon, instead of 9 am EST to 1 am EST, we can probably bump it to 6 or 7 am EST to 10 pm - 11 pm EST. But I don't know. We can always switch games around too so that the showcase games get the best time slots. If it's a 40 hour marathon or we do some 100% runs (I think that would be pretty cool too) then there are always going to be hours that have less viewers, again we'd just plan to show the most popular games during peak hours.

I agree, backup runners are a must. I can be one of those since I have a very high quality capture setup now, including a camcorder so I can do commentary feed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_ak_jchv3k). If I was prepared as a backup I could have easily done OoT instead of Jiano. I would love to be a part of future ZSR streams to show what I can do live.

Also spam was a big problem(near the end of WW was ridiculous). I saw there was a slow mode setting on the chat, but it was too slow in my opinion. 10-15 second wait limit per comment would be good if possible.

Regarding slow mode: I was in the chat on mIRC, when you turn on slow mode it says "RingRush sets mode: +Z 60". So I guess just change the number and you have a different setting. I tried sticking it on 10 at one point but everyone was complaining so eh. :/

Also, agreed with everything Runnerguy said.

Completely agree with everything said here in the thread.  The runs were great, of course, but doing it at the same time as them absolutely killed their viewers, and they were doing it for charity while we were doing it for fun.  Sure, we still supported the charity, but we did absolutely nothing to advertise the original site, which I believe should have been done.  Also, we probably shouldn't have been pointing out how far ahead we were (I'm very guilty of that), especially with the situation.

This weekend also proved something to us: people like seeing the Zelda games absolutely destroyed and beaten incredibly quickly.  I imagine a run of every Zelda game, with a schedule released beforehand, could draw in more viewers and raise quite a bit of money in a short amount of time.  If we were to schedule one quite a while in advance, throw spoilers up on youtube channels, advertise on other sites, and so on and so forth, we could get these things to be really popular, and then the marathon ends up being truly a success.  With this whole scheduling, games like OoT, MM, and TP need to be put in higher traffic hours while the lesser liked games like FSA, AoL, and MC be designated to the nighttime spots.  Also, I think a case could be made to put the more broken games in higher traffic spots.

Commentary also seems like a good idea.  With OoT and MM especially (to a lesser extent TP), the routes around the game are so broken that people have no clue what's going on.  While it isn't necessary, I think it would free up a lot of chat space if we had someone doing audio commentary (textual maybe) to say what's going on, while not spoiling the rest of the run.  This would keep questions out of the chat, and hopefully make slow mode unnecessary, with a couple select mods (for example, the mods here) stopping spammers from reigning free.

Unrelated, but the game times:
Grunz, I get a 2:30 SS without credits on a good day in MC.  If we include credits, you're looking at 2:45-2:50 maximum.  As Tompa said, Ages is longer than Seasons, but luck could add a ton of time on to the game, in both versions.  LA also needs a severe time cut: you could probably go sub 1:30 with credits.  The screenwarping method is far too inconsistent to rely on in a one try SS.

@Tompa: How in hell do we do FS?

I agree with you all, and I hope we can find a way to do a 48 hour marathon of (nearly) all the games.

My suggestion is that we do it sometime over winter break, failing that over march break/spring break, and failing that over the summer.

I can run the two NES titles and Minish Cap, unless other people want to run those (YARIGHTLOL)


This could be epic if we actually get our shit together :)

Cosmo, or Maxx, set up a simple html table of each game, estimated time and nominated runners.

yeah i would love to at least be a backup for oot if we do another of these after i get a webcam. I consider myself to be at least above average at oot, considering how well i'm able to pull off hard tricks (example: botw chus and chu megaflips), so hopefully i'll get to do a run for a marathon one day ;D

Why not add Master quest to the marathon if you're going to do all of them?

It would be exactly the same as OoT, save for I think one room in the trials area because neither enters a dungeon/temple.

Oh yeah sorry I forgot about RBA.

Even as a new guy here, I agree with everything that has been said in the thread.

And while I lack the games to practice for runs with (being unemployed sucks!), I'm willing to help out in any way possible with things like promoting marathons (I don't upload projects on my YT channel anymore, but I can put promotion stuff up) and such.

When the time comes, I'll be willing to do anything just to be a part of it and also to have a good time!

Great job to those who ran the games yesterday!

EDIT: I am actually able to help with commentating if we decide on it, as I now have a decent microphone

I'm sure most of the mistakes were just because we only had 2 days to set everything up.  I'm sure if we had more time it wouldn't have been that bad.

About the credits if we do an all zelda run: I'm pretty sure the only reason we watched the credits ion this was because 448 was too.  In our own marathon we'll just forget about them.

Runnerguy, I think the lack of "OMG HAX" comments was because most of the advertising was done on youtube, and most people who saw it were alreasy subscribed to big glitchers so they kinda knew what was going on.  Ustream didn't even put it under recommended shows (even though we had 10x more viewers than some of the other recommended, wtf?) so I doubt many people found us from there.

Also, if we do do an all zelda marathon, I think OoT should be done twice, once no dungeon and once MST :D

http://zeldaspeedruns.com/junk/all_game_marathon.php (http://zeldaspeedruns.com/junk/all_game_marathon.php)

Link to the page I made (Soon to be edited by the Cosmo, the photoshop wizard)

Lets hope a nice table like this gets shit done.

^ I take it that people are already testing Spirit Tracks as we speak?

Wow, 37 hours estimate...

Well if I get to play and really fuck up we'll still be good lol.

Ah come on. Last time they also had only 20 viewers and that without our help. They are just really bad. I mean 48 hours is really horrible. There are other marathons who do this kind of stuff in 30 hours, without glitches.

The "get Jijo a Wii so that he can do good MM-runs foundation"? :D