Gaming marathons for charity

I saw an article on slashdot yesterday about a group of guys (half are Canadian…awesome) who are playing a Final Fantasy marathon over a week for the autism charity ACT Today. The group from is rotating players and randomly playing all Final Fantasy games up to 12 (excluding the XI MMO I believe). The 3 live streams lets viewers watch the game feed, the “couch” where the gamer is seated along with the others gamers stretching for their game, and the color commentary via a laptop webcam. The commentator reads the live chat and banters back while telling funny gaming stories and making bets with the charity contributers such as:

  • for every $5 donated during a set period of time, one of the waiting gamers will complete a barrel roll. They got up to 113 rolls, the first half being quite impressive while the later half of them was a sleep depraved gamer laying on the floor barely moving.
  • a single $100 donation dare had one gamer drink…ahem…a mana potion, mixed with a health potion, mixed with a spoonful of 2 day old vegemite, and a menthol cough drop.  The gamer actually vomited BEFORE drinking it due to the foul smell and having been awake for 40 hours. Funny stuff.

At this moment, they are at $33 000 which blew away their previous goal of $20 000. They have reset the bar to $50 000 and will probably clear that before the deadline of July 24th. They are getting a lot of news coverage and I encourage people to go check out the site and watch for abit. Drop some money on a great charity too if you feel inclined!