It goes without saying that we at White Giant RPG Studios love playing RPGs almost as much as we love making them. As a group, WGRPG places a strong emphasis on competition and tradition – two values that are best exemplified by a series of RPG speedrunning tournaments that we’ve held on and off for over a decade.
This blog post is part of a series on the WGRPG Tournaments.
The Formative Years
The tournaments had a humble origin: while in college, the WGRPG founders challenged each other to grueling gaming marathons that strained the limits of what the human body can endure, all with a nominal sum of cash (and primarily pride) on the line. Gaming marathons stretched to 24 hours with bathroom breaks at your own detriment! Popular early “tournament” games included NES Final Fantasy 1, Chrono Trigger, and Lufia 2.
Of course, the times for each WGRPG staff member paled in comparison to those of actualspeedrunners, but the goal was always to push ourselves just a bit closer to perfection. (We also compete in cross-country running, and our times – shockingly – also do not compare favorably to Olympic athletes.)
Onwards and Upwards
As time marched on, it quickly became clear that we had a problem: Mandrew (our chief programmer) was just too good at RPGs! A decision was made to burden him with various impairments, such as giving others a significant head start or forcing him to play on a higher in-game difficulty level. The goal was to make each RPG competition feel like a blistering fight to the finish line. There was even a Final Fantasy 1 competition where 1st place finished a mere handful of seconds ahead of 2nd place – for a 6+ hour run!
Around this time, the WGRPG tournament (currently called “SideQuest”) was first formalized. The WGRPG folks were out of college at this point, but Josh (our business manager) took it upon himself to arrange semi-annual tournaments, as well as provide meticulous record-keeping, so that we could see our progress. In the spirit of variety, new games were sometimes added to the mix: Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 6, and even Zelda: A Link to the Past.
The New Blood
Over time, new people joined the staff of WGRPG – and children of the original developers grew old enough to play games themselves! Eventually, we were faced with a problem: our impairments weren’t stopping the top players from winning; rather, they were discouraging the remaining folks from practicing! (It’s pretty demoralizing to lose a Chrono Trigger race to someone using a dance pad who starts 5 hours after you.) Pre-tournament practice rates plummeted.
That said, there were some crucial developments during this period. We started modifying the games we played (via cheat codes or plain old Assembly hacking) to create difficulty levels in games that didn’t even have them originally. Additionally, we put a lot more effort into the selection of the tournament game – after all, this would be “the game” for the next two years of our lives! As a result, we had a string of fantastic tournaments, featuring games like Last Dream 1 and Dragon Quest 3.
Something we’ve glossed over here: the Last Dream franchise actually exists because WGRPG’s founders wanted a good tournament game and – seeing that none existed – decided to create their own. The fruits of that labor were finally ripe for the harvest!
That Changes Everything!
Finally, in 2020, we hit on two ideas that would radically change our tournament structure: not only shaking up the leaderboards, but also dramatically increasing engagement and pre-tournament practice enthusiasm. We’ll cover this in our next blog post, but I’ll provide a sneak peek –see if you can figure out what we did!
