We will begin our 25th gaming marathon on December 16th starting at 6pm central. My personal favorite franchise The Legend of Zelda will be played for 72 hours around the clock. The event  is in support of Rocking H Ranch charities. The charities are Paws for Reflection Ranch, Tara Sawyer Foundation, Trent’s Retreat Nonprofit Foundation. For more information on the charities you can go here: http://www.rockingh.net/Rocking_H_Ranch/Charities.html . You can view the entire marathon from our homepage, www.TheSpeedGamers.com

Our goal will be to raise $15,000 in 72 hours. If we reach our goal by 6pm central on December 19th, we will extend the event by 24 hours. We have raised approximately $290,000 for various causes since our inception in March of 2008.

We have had many great prize donations that will be given away over the course of the marathon. Everything from Master sword/shield and Ocarina replicas to boxed copies of A Link to the Past. I will post a full list of our prizes soon a long with a youtube video detailing the goods.

Unfamiliar with TheSpeedGamers?  Watch this news clip explaining what we do: http://bit.ly/sRPrGE

Our annual week long marathon is nearly here. This year we will be playing through the Star Wars series from July 8-15. We have chosen Direct Relief International to game for. After one of the worst tornado seasons in history, we wanted to do our part in helping recover from the numerous disasters that occurred this year. Our goal is to raise $30,000 which would put us over $300,000 total for our 3 year existence.

It’s hard to wrap my head around just how many games we are playing this year. Unlike our last marathon (Metroid) and many of our other previous events, there is less of an emphasis on “speed”. We have 168 hours to fill and getting that many people to volunteer let alone be at the top of their game is difficult. The runs will of course be fun and our commentary highly interactive and enjoyable.

You can of course watch all of our runs here on TheSpeedGamers.com along with our video commentary.

Be sure to be there at the start, we’ve got a special intro much like our last Mother marathon.

What an excellent end to a great marathon. Going into the last 24 hours of the Metroid marathon we had raised a little over $4,000 for Civic-Force. We ended with over $8,000 in donations, a huge surge from the auction, incredible! We really want to thank Fangamer for teaming up with us and bringing in over $1,500 for the cause. We look forward to collaborating with them again in the future. Also a big thank you to all of the players, commentators, chat ops, viewers and mods for volunteering their time to make this event so successful.

Our Star Wars marathon is up next, July 8-15. Keep checking back to TheSpeedGamers.com for more details.

May 6-9th we will be playing through the Metroid series to raise money for Japan. The choice of charity is still being sorted out as well as other details.

Once again we will be teaming up with our friends at Fan Gamer. Just like during the Mario Marathon, they will sell a Metroid themed shirt during the marathon and the proceeds will go towards the charity we are gaming for. This went extremely well last summer and was a driving force behind our record amount of $57,000.

We are ecstatic for May to get here! New entertaining and off the wall stunts will be performed during the event. I hope to put out a teaser for the “Wheel of Misery” in the coming week.

Keep checking back to www.TheSpeedGamers.com for more details!

TheSpeedGamers have received multiple partnership offers over the last couple of months. We’ve been patient and are nearing settling our future plans with either Ustream or Justin.tv but will not rule out other suitors.

Starting on Monday February 21st we will be streaming around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Monday through Friday from 6pm-8pm central we will break from a muted view of our office to bring you full fledged gaming centered shows. Currently we are putting together a lineup that we think would be suited best for our community and gamers in general. We will also have live streams from major video game and hardware launches. First of which will be the launch of the 3DS. None of this will affect our marathon schedule.

What this means for me is this is my full time job. As TheSpeedGamers grow so will the employment opportunities. Playing video games for charity, tough gig right? Of course TheSpeedGamers was not built on the notion of becoming a business. Raising money and awareness for causes that we believe in is our passion. We cannot pass up the opportunity you guys have given us. This will help us grow at an even faster rate and give us an even bigger platform to spread our message.

Thank you TSG community for all of your support over the years and we look forward to growing with all of you.
Sincerely,
Britt

What a great year for TheSpeedGamer community.  In 2010 we raised over $129,000 out of our total $254,000. That doesn’t include the unforgettable auction we helped host with our friends over at Fangamer that pulled in $10,146 for the Michael J Fox Foundation. 2011 looks to be an even bigger year starting with a  surprise announcement regarding our upcoming marathons. We are hoping to make that announcement on January 1st.

On a side note the “TSG Boy” shirts have arrived and will be shipping this Monday.

What a marathon! With over $5,000 left to raise and under 24 hours left to go in our Kingdom Heart’s marathon, a lot of people thought it was impossible to reach our goal. In the end, we raised over $10,000 for bestfriends.org and surpassed our goal.

The move to Justin.tv proved to be a success. We reached viewer amounts that we have not seen since the Mario Marathon, and we were able to reach our goal even with the 48 hours of technical issues that we had with paypal. We are still working with Justin.tv to make sure everyone is able to view us. We are thinking up ways on our end so that people with lower download speeds and various computer setups can view us with less difficulty. I think by the Pokemon marathon we will have everything resolved.

Each day behind the scenes was filled with monopoly,campfires,  smores, cards and other shenanigans. It was a lot of fun meeting the community  members and hanging out with them for the weekend.

Everyone who took part in the marathon should be very proud. Without the promotion or viewers we could not have done it. I say this a lot but it needs to be said again; We have the best community on the interwebs!

See you guys this Spring!

The marathon details video is posted after the break.