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.
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 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.
