Alright guys, summer is only a few months away and we still have a lot of organizing to do with this.
First, it seems pretty obvious that
this widget should be used, I've seen it on nearly every marathon raising money for a charity. It seems easy enough to set up. If we can't put it on the ustream page itself, then we can alter our homepage (we may want to do that anyway) and put it there, and then just link people to
www.zeldaspeedruns.com (that may encourage them to check out the site as well). We could put both the stream and this widget on our homepage and then just link everyone to the homepage.
I was looking at some charities and I think the best approach would be to pick one that raises money for children. I like this idea because everyone loves to help kids (which means we raise more money) and lets face it; for all of us to have internet access and play these video games as kids, we are in a pretty fortunate situation. Not all children get to enjoy the things we enjoy.
Here is a list of 25 top children's charities, and there are many others as well.
I'm thinking, we can just send a generic email to them, saying something like, "Dear [charity], we are going to be raising money for a gaming marathon and would like to benefit a charity. We have looked into your organization and were wondering if you would like to sponser us. -ZSR Team" or some junk like that. It obviously needs to be worded good but then we just see who we get replies from and pick one. I assume that's how it works, did anyone see/work with SDA when they did their marathon? Or any other marathon?
Ok, on the gaming side of things, we need to get that page back up with runners and back-up runners, as well as commentators if we are going to do that. If we do commentators I say that person is on a skype call AND can be heard in the main stream, OR we set up a secondary account and have that person face a webcam and then have two streams like SDA did (people are probably gonna ask you to take off your shirt because I've seen that multiple times on marathons so you got to say, "If you donate $10 dollars", haha). The goal of the commentator should pretty much just be to interact with the people chatting, and especially answer questions on some of the tricks and glitches the runner does.
The time this should take place should weigh heavily in favor of the 2D ZELDA GAMERS! This is really critical. We've got probably 10+ people that could do OoT under 1:30 (Actually setting up two streams and having a race would be highly entertaining, imo; the loser then has to drop out and we continue to the next game). How many people can run the Minish Cap? Or Zelda II? We need to work the schedule around these people, and then fill in the gaps with the 3D games where we have more options.
Once we do all this, we are going to want to spread the word. We managed to get around 300 viewers at one point for WW (let's face it, not the most exciting game in the series) for only advertising on one day. Imagine what we could do with a few weeks of advertising. Make threads on gaming boards, post youtube videos, put it on your facebook, etc. It's easy to sell because we can state with confidence that we are the fastest Zelda players out there.
So yeah, discuss things I mentioned and state if you can play games and who's gonna be playing what since I looked over the first page and not everyone who posted there is active anymore.
Obviously I'm willing to do OoT as I'll be home during the summer and will have the webcam stream.
