Category: Uncategorized

Grandmaster Challenge Commentary Donation Drive

By kuroppi | April 22, 2015 | Posted in: Europe, Uncategorized

Our friends across the pond, Grandmaster Challenge, is running a Commentary donation drive to help get equipment for their streams and events.
http://www.grandmasterchallenge.com/?p=1250

For 3 years now, we have been organising tournaments and supporting events all around the country in our endeavour to show people that Super Turbo is still played seriously and has a passionate scene. We have also been attracting new players as well as reviving the interest of older players, meaning that the scene is stronger and more diverse than it has been in years.
Due to the support we offer to tournament organisers, as well as the community who support us by attending such events, Super Turbo retains a strong prescence at tournaments despite the onslaught of new games. We have even inspired other tournament organisers to pick up ST who now run it of their own accord.
However, it wasn’t always so good. ST was largely neglected; often relegated to side tournament status which meant it had little to no promotion, few setups, no hype and generally wasn’t recorded. It would mostly be a couple of Xbox 360s in a corner to keep people quiet.

We got sick of seeing ST get sidelined and decided to step up our game and become involved in running, supporting and hosting tournaments to the point where we now host tournaments on arcade hardware with head to head setups, fully captured and with a spectator screen or projector. We now also co-host a multi game tournament in Chesterfield called Sunday Geek Hype. Some of the events we have supported either by loaning hardware, capturing or running them include:

i series
Play Expo
Super Turbo Sunday
IIX 20th Anniversary
Warriors Return
VS Fighting
King of the North
Rival Scenes
3Sports
Super Strike Saturday
Sunday Face Off Monthlies
Sunday Geek Hype

This all had to be funded personally, so growth has been somewhat slow.

The way most events work is that they charge a venue/entry fee and a separate tournament fee (per game). The venue/entry fee goes towards paying to hire the venue and whatever is left goes towards funding future events and setups. Since we hold side tournaments at existing events, we only charge the tournament fee. We do not get a cut of the venue/entry fee, meaning that we do not make any money from events.

That was largely irrelevant to us though as we were never interested in making money. We just saw ourselves as players doing our bit to support the game we love. However it did mean that we had no money to invest in events or setups.

However there is one final piece to our traveling tournament setup that is missing and that is a commentary setup. It has been way down the priority list since it is so expensive and doesn’t have any personal use to us (it would only be useful for tournaments). This is something that has been increasingly requested lately, even more now that we support so many events and co-host Sunday Geek Hype. What with us starting Super Turbo Sunday again, we feel the time is right to get a commentary setup sorted and push Super Turbo Sunday to be the flagship ST event that it should be.
So this is where we’d like to appeal to the Super Turbo community to help us pool together the funds required to buy an audio mixer and headsets. We are still researching the headset side of things as it seems to be very difficult to find something suitable, high quality and durable at a reasonable price point.

We are currently looking at:

Mixer: Yamaha MG10XU (1x£150)
Headsets: Audio Technica BPHS1 (2x£120)

We always plan for the long term, and having a flexible, high quality setup is important to us as it allows us to support many different events and hardware configurations and give Super Turbo the main game treatment that it deserves. Although expensive, this is a very high quality setup. The same headsets were used at EVO for the main commentary, are used by Sergjiev for his Arkadeum broadcasts and ST tournaments that he streams and will be used at the UK’s upcoming major, Hypespotting.

We do not expect to be able to raise the complete amount, but anything the community can help with would be very much appreciated. Thank you!