Tournament-In-Review Still To Come

I am not ready to post my recap of this weekend's event, as I would like to let it "settle" for a bit first, and to absorb the thoughts of others who spectated or participated.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the blog this weekend to follow my coverage of the Kong Off 2!

At any given moment over the last 48 hours, at least 5 of you were simultaneously active on the blog, as many as 20 at the peak. If any of you happened to be keeping score, you might have noticed Donkey Blog's view counter (on the lower right) growing at a far higher pace than normal. I had a "five-figure" weekend (in fact, a fairly large percentage of this blog's total combined traffic came in these two days).

For the classic arcade gaming hobby, that's not too shabby! Especially since so many of my visitors this weekend were from "the real world," and not just links from within our little pocket of hardcore gamers (though, obviously, I appreciated those too).

Definitely a success on my end.

Thanks to all the competitors for putting up a good fight, and for giving me a sporting event to cover, something I've always wanted to do.

Thanks to Aurcade and (for a few hours) Mike Groesbeck, who kept me up to speed on scores.

I also wanted to thank Jourdan Adler, Richie Knucklez, and many others, whose names I don't know, for their work in setting up this amazing event.

Several key elements of last night's Arcade Culture stream regarding the end of the old Twin Galaxies and the future of the new one were distressing to me, as to many others. My emotions were compromised, and as a consequence, my coverage of Day 2. By the time the Arcade Culture stream was over, the tournament had fallen into the distant background, and I never posted the Day 1 recap I intended to. A lot of great action went unreported, particularly the neck-and-neck Wiebe/Chien game that ended the day. Sorry to the readers for politics getting in the way.

I have, however, calmed down (a lot) since I posted my initial response to the stream. (Which, by the way, has quite the comment thread going...)

Twin Galaxies is heading in an entirely new direction, and I was made very suddenly aware that I can no longer compete, or plan to compete, at this game (or any other) the way that I have been. The competitive landscape itself has been redefined dramatically. This blog (the leaderboard in particular) will have to be restructured in accordance with that new reality. I will adjust, and I will bid the old Twin Galaxies goodbye.

My desire for how Twin Galaxies should work (that is, simply a better-functioning version of exactly what it was) doesn't align with the new vision (a totally new and different organism). We see things differently. I can handle that if they can.

It helped to take a breath and say: "Chris, It's Donkey Kong, for #@!*'s sake," and to remind myself that I was determined never to get involved in "gamer drama." Nobody—not even teenage girls—does drama bigger than competitive gamers! Oh well. Congratulations, you've all sucked me in.

Disagreements aside (and they are big disagreements that I will do my best not to get ugly about when the time comes to talk about them), The Kong Off 2 was a massive success, and a great deal of talent and effort was brought to bear in putting it together.

No matter how you feel about where Jourdan and Richie are taking TG, they deserve a round of applause for this weekend's festivities.

One more post tonight and the rest will wait for another time.