Hi everybody. How are you doing? Gameweek has just ended and while I am STILL tired 2 days later, I can honestly say it was a great time.
For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, Extra Life did things a little different this year. Where as over it's long and storied history, the charity culminated in a single Game Day where gamers would play for 24 hours straight, this year a full week was dedicated so gamers could take full advantage and pick whatever day works best for them. You can see our event across several vods that currently live on our twitch page and will ultimately (for the most part) be moved to our Rumble channel so they can live for more then a week. (Yeah, that's a real issue... thanks twitch.)
But what is Extra Life, I hear some of you ask. Well to explain, lets set the way-back machine to a younger time when gaming websites were booming and I personally had found myself treating one as my online home called "Sarcastic Gamer." If you were there, it was exactly what you would have expected from a community site of the 2000s: it had a forum for gamers to talk, joke, share gaming discoveries, and it even had a podcast or two for weekly radio-style shows, and I absolutely loved all of it. But it was not always happy news. The founder, "Doc", was the one who would drop the biggest bombshell for as long as I was called it home... the day Victoria passed away. Who was Victoria? Well Doc was a friend to her family, so he knew her personally before she lost her fight with cancer in Texas Children's Cancer Center. I still remember driving into work and listening to that podcast as it had downloaded the night before, and those tears still haunt me.
But from this heartbreak came Extra Life, an event to give her legacy meaning and to thank the hospital for their efforts to help this girl in that fight. And of course the community took to it like fish to water. We would spend the next few weeks to raise money for the hospital, then do what we all do best to push it to the end: a 24 hour gaming marathon. I am still honored to be have been a part of that very first Extra Life in 08, but it wasn't enough for any of us. We would do it again in 09, an 2010, and so on... and here we are now. Sarcastic Gamer is gone, Doc has moved on to work with Children's Miracle Network directly, and the event itself has gone global through them... but we are still here, doing what we love and using that hobby to help the kids who need it most.
And as I noted, at the very beginning, Gameweek for this wrapped up yesterday, Sunday November 16th. Personally I am grateful to be able to help out with this and to do my part. Personally I play for Boston Children's Hospital.
Looking back over the year, I can not say this was an easy one, though. I had to take roughly a month out of the situation due to medical reasons which frankly took me down hard enough, for two separate hospital stays, the latter ending with several days at my folks place to recover. Nor can I honestly say that was the only issue I've had this year... in fact I would argue 2025 was my year of Hell. BUT we still managed to bring in $400 ourselves for the event, no small amount for a small community like this. And I would like to thank you all for that.
But we are not done with this year. Extra Life takes donations year round, so if you would like to help us help the kids, we are still going through the end of the year.... you can expect the same twice-a-week Extra Life streams I've been doing for a while now... and we will be on Twitch for a little while longer since the Extra Life page will be active through December and links directly to the service. Thank you for any help you give now or in the future... the kids need it and I am humbled.
Thank you again - Megabyte: Head Archivist of the Red Sector