The Epic Marathon Contest
A Retrospective Feature by Kingston C. Rockwell

For the past six years, the Epic Marathon has been the grandest contest in the OHR community. When Pepsi Ranger introduced it in 2002, he challenged the people to create a train of sequels with a minimum of information between them. With the fifth edition now under way, HamsterSpeak is honoring the contest with a look back on its history from someone who was there to experience it: two-time Epic Marathon winner Kingston C. Rockwell, HamsterSpeak's own man on the street.

When the Epic Marathon first started out, I was a fledgling designer still testing out his wings. I had a newbie demo and a contest winner under my belt, but nothing really to brag about, so, in a way, the Epic Marathon was a defining part of my participation in the community. It's always carried a personal relevance, a sort of prestige, so whenever a new one comes around I'm the first guy to perk up and start listening.

Pepsi Ranger recently gave his thoughts on the purpose of the contest:
"When I envisioned the Magnus Sequel Marathon (the first Epic Marathon) six years ago, my intention was to create something that was unlike any other contest to hit the community so far...The first incarnation of Epic Marathon was praised for doing just that (even if the subject was controversial). I tried to keep that uniqueness going for each incarnation to come along since."

The Magnus Sequel Marathon was the first of its kind, instead of offering a time limit or a simple theme to follow, contestants made sequels to Magnus, one of the most infamous games made using the engine. What made Magnus stick in the minds of the people has never been too clear. It wasn't the worst game ever made, even when I'd joined the community in March of 2001 Bugamon Quest was recognized for its lack of playability, and was significantly worse. What might have made Magnus so fascinating was the fact that it was technically finished, but offered no substance to its plot or characters. The game's only reason for progressing was because the progression was there to follow, but Pepsi Ranger saw potential in that skeleton of a plot and decided to leave it to the community to realize it.

The point of the contest wasn't to remake Magnus as a game worth playing, or even necessarily to make it relevant, just to take what potential could be salvaged from the indecipherable mess it presented and build on it, to make it an epic the community could be proud of. When I first read the contest's announcement, my interest was piqued, but to be perfectly honest, I didn't jump immediately to the call. I hung back a bit and waited to see how things developed. I had other projects to see to.

Everybody was assigned a number for their sequel, the rules requiring that if they signed up, something, whatever it was, had to be submitted. It was about a month later that I was hanging around IRC and Moogle1 was looking for a playtester for a little demo he was working on for the contest. Knowing his reputation and excited about the offer, I pulled a file swap with him, him showing me the intro to Magnus 5, me showing him a work-in-progress for a game I was working on, Knights of The Realm that was mostly just graphics and a basic gameplay test, lost a million hard drive crashes ago and now long defunct. It wasn't technically cheating, as it would be another week or two before I even knew I would be entering the contest, but it was enough that I was sure then that he'd sweep the thing.

Back since my first days on the internet, I used to collect Final Fantasy 7 MIDIs to compare different arrangements. One I had was misspelled "Off The Edge Of Dispair", and joking around with that tile, my little brother and I eventually came up with the idea of a twin-peaked mountain and a guy who wanted to throw himself off of it. In coming up with a reason why the guy would want to do this, we'd discovered the plot to Magnus 17, and the next day I signed up for the contest. The game had a lot of quirks, the one I've heard the most was that the story was pointless. It's not so much that I've never understood this, I just think that those people mistake a lack of high-stakes for the lack of a point. It might not've been the cleverest thing in the world, but what can you expect from a sixteen year old amateur? I'd built it on the framework that Magnus gave, but added my own personal flavor, most particularly a type of humor that doesn't appeal to me these days, along with a haughty self-righteousness. Those, to me, are the most dated parts about the game.

I'd graduated from high school a little after I started on that game, and went on to spend most of my time making the pictures for the intro. It had sixteen. They took me over a month. I decided then I wouldn't make any more. The towns had very basic layouts, each set up in a 9x9 grid, not just 'cos I’m lazy, but because I’ve never liked map design and generally lacked the time. Maps have never seemed incredibly important to me, maybe because immersion isn't my immediate goal, but I've always seen the maps as just a stage. Where a thing is happening isn't nearly as important as what the thing is that's happening. I think the reviewer's focus on map design was mostly instilled by the paragraph made for it on Castle Paradox's review form, which is probably there because one of the site's designers at the time was very review minded and happened to have a knack for map design. The maptiles were something of an experiment in gradients. I kind've liked them myself, the house exteriors especially. I made a lot of original music, but at least half of it was fragmented. They had basic melodies that were more skeletons than songs, or they had a pretty solid idea that just needed to be carried out all the way, and that's how I've seen the game as a whole all these years. It had potential, but I'd tossed too many balls in the air at the same time and couldn't catch some of them, and the rush to get it finished gets even more apparent from Yupifatelot (a name I made up just for the novelty of having every vowel) on, with a meandering final dungeon with too many random encounters and weak, though multiple, endings (I had much bigger ideas for each of the endings. As an example, I wanted to make the Nihilistic ending more like the credits to Final Fantasy 6, only instead of the Falcon flying past various landscapes, it would be Willy; it was gonna be awesome). And even with all that, it was still a month late, finished on June 24th, according to the textfile I'd included with it (though that same file clocks it in at an hour twenty minutes, when I've easily spent two hours on it each subsequent playthrough). I'd have felt bad if basically every other entrant hadn't been just as late.

Personally, that's where my experience with the Magnus Sequel Marathon ended. I'd taken a break from the community after releasing the game and got my first job. I didn't really expect to win or anything, I just hoped that somebody would have as much fun playing it as I did making it, that enough people would seek out the sidequests to get to fight Neo-Ryan, who, aside from being one of the hardest fights in the game along with Jerusifa, was definitely my favorite part to make. I'd like to look back on this game and say that a lot of the parts that made RPG conventions feel broken were intentional, the unnecessary equipment progression (each town is maybe ten steps apart, will you really need a new weapon that soon?), the random encounter rate, the item drops, a lot of it just phones it in, it's there because the genre demanded it. All those unintentional marks against the RPG I can't take credit for, but Neo-Ryan's design I can. The guy's a winged half-Adonis half-octopus not only because he has to be, but because there's a ludicrous joy in seeing something as simple Magnus' hero turned into a grotesque parody of what king of progeny you could expect if One-Winged Angel got it on with Ultros.

But back from that rabbit trail, of the seventeen contestants, only eight submitted an entry, though I think Dr. Clock had been banned, Shadowiii dropped out due to multiple hard drive crashes, and James Smith came back as J.A.R.S. five years later, showing off his relic of a Magnus 13 (which starred Moogle1 and myself as terrible winged beasties for some inexplicable reason).

The entries included:
~ Gizmog1 released part three, which started with a sewer race that I, honestly, have never gotten past.
~ Aethereal released a file that explained how his and Fortis' Escape From Castle LEELEE was dreadfully unfinished and ran down the basic plot.
~ Moogle1's Quest for the 38 Crystals was complete, maybe not to the scale it was originally planned, but did have all 38 crystals. I think I had to fix a bug to finish it.
~ I haven't played Melnazar's part six in years, and remember next to nothing about it, but I do remember Melnazar was a pretty cool guy, and one of my favorite graphic artists that ever worked with OHR. What ever happened to him?
~ Part 7 was The Quest For Magna. I know nothing about the author, but I think this was his only game, and a pretty sad effort it was. I played it all the way through years ago, but it's not worth bothering with.
~ Bobert made Part 8: The Fuck, an angry, frenetic Zelda-style that was actually pretty cool, except that actually beating it required playing through the game multiple times, which sounds like the worst method of level grinding ever, and is. The weirdest part is I don't see Bobert down as a participant in any of the documentation I got from Pepsi Ranger for this article. My best guess is Squall dropped out and passed the number off.
~ Grandtrain did part nine, which is one of the more enduring titles of the series. With Zantetsuken gone I can't tell you how well it did in the votes, but I remember it being pretty okay for a game that doesn't have any battle backgrounds. It had pretty nice graphics and starred a Ryan that was displaced in time instead of dying when Hercil sacrificed him to "spill Minotaur's blood" (whatever the hell that even means).
~ One of the few games Hachi-Roku of IRC idling and OHR House fame has under his belt was Magnus 10: The Graphic Novel, a game without graphics.
~ Part eleven was my own. Yeah, I always called it Magnus 17 after its intended place in the series, but with half the contestants dropping out, the numbering system had to stay consistent. Interestingly enough, I think this was my first and only finished conventional RPG.
~ Kazura-Sama, whose biggest claim to fame was being Specsplosive's little brother, made the finale, The Adventures Of NEWB MAHN!!!1", one of the few entries that deliberately went for the "crap" option, a design method that would later be further explored with the Terrible Game Contests.

In the end, my entry won. Being offline during that time, I can't tell you how much of it was design points and how much was votes, I'd only gotten online for a bit to see how things turned out. Archives to this vote have been lost to age.

Things were quiet for a while. Sure, life went on in the community. Other contests were held. Zantetsuken closed, and Castle Paradox rose in its place. I came back from my hiatus in late March, trying to find out as much as I could about the Magnus Sequel Marathon. Luckily the Operation: OHR archives had a .zip file with the whole series. About half a year later, whispers of the sequel to the sequel contest were heard. It was postponed, but in March 2004 it made its debut, now called the Epic Marathon Contest, and with a painfully planned original backstory called Volcanic Kings. It included a fully devised world set across six years of a war between the invading king of the rich Volcanic Island and the rest of the world. Locations, timelines, continent maps, characters of interest, all of these things came included. A handful of contestants chose a month in the timeline to work from, some of them providing character and location details in a thread prepared on Castle Paradox's Story Time board.

The deadline came and went. No entries were submitted. People'd put a lot of work into their entries, Leroy_Leo especially, but no one had anything near playable, much less finished. Disheartened by all the wasted effort he'd put in, Pepsi Ranger swore there wouldn't be another Epic Marathon. I remember being disappointed and it felt unfair. 2004 was a busy summer for me, so I wasn't able to participate, but the prospect of the Epic Marathon never happening again scared me, and I just wanted someone to blame other than myself. If we look at all the factors, there were a few problems with the contest that could easily have contributed to its failure.

First, I think perhaps Pepsi Ranger put too much work into planning it. With a world already fully realized, there wasn't a lot for the players to create themselves. The Magnus games had the freedom to make something that was vaguely related to the original game, with all the details filled in by the respective authors. Volcanic Kings offered all the details already, though it's conceivable that someone could make a game that just used it as a backdrop, the idea as it came out encouraged making a game centered around a provided story. This could easily have scared some prospective contestants away.

Second, the timeframe. The Magnus Sequel Marathon ran, according to a post of Pepsi Ranger's, for eight months (again, with the forum it was on is no longer available, but the oldest date on any of the documents I have tells us it was running in early February, and I'd joined myself in late March and disappeared off the face of the internet after releasing my entry in late June, so we'll have to take his word for it), with every entry running at least a month late, and that's with most of them being rushed or unfinished. Volcanic Kings ran from May to early August, starting out, as had been discussed in the first thread, right in the middle of finals, a bad month for gamemaking in general, and the ones after it being contest season, there's just too much vying for a person's attention during that period to commit to such a large-scale project. I'm not trying to make excuses or anything, but with the provided epic-scale story, something that matches the scope intended isn't going to happen in those short months, especially in a community full of people who had their "one big project" that they'd been sitting on for years and still hadn't made any progress on. But being that the deadline was extended for the Magnus Sequel Marathon, I'm not sure how fair it is that the contest was immediately closed and canceled without an offer for extension, though some of the contestants posted about trying their best to get their entries done, and the rules even said that entries would be accepted for another week. My best guess is that Pepsi was just so tired from all the work he'd put into it that the disappointment set in too quickly for him to give it another chance.

Third, and perhaps the most minor, is the lack of design missions. Hell, I always loved them. Fun little elements to throw into your game for bonus points is something we've only otherwise seen in RedMaverickZero's April Fool's Day contest, better known as The Contest That Brought Us Super Walrus Chef, though it made the mistake of Penalizing entries for leaving them out rather than the Epic Marathon's method of rewarding for them.

Whatever the factors were, the failure of the second Epic Marathon cast a shadow on, if not the community, at least myself. I've mentioned before that the contest has a very personal relevance to me, so seeing it disappear was a shock. A lot of things happened in that next year, for me and for the community. I started drawing my comic, moved out of my parent's house and on to another state, watched from both thrall and the sidelines as the community went through various crises, and eventually fell out of it again as my internet connection became less dependable, so when Pepsi Ranger started testing the waters for a third Epic Marathon in September 2005, I was getting all my news secondhand.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and within a week of the water-testing post, the third Epic Marathon was underway. Mynorety Whispers was everything the past two contests did right with none of their problems. Instead of spending months on the concept and wearing himself out, Pepsi Ranger spent a few hours putting together basic common elements for the games to share the way any Zelda does, which was the idea, not to make stories that carried on where the last left off as games that all took place in the same land and had heroes that all looked the same and had the same name, but weren't necessarily the same person, just an inheritance of the mantle and spirit of the hero, Mynorety, appearing to take on the same recurring evil, The Echo. It had the design missions ready right off the bat, since there was no world-building to get in the way of their devising, and a generous timeframe that still ended up being extended by another month.

After a number of dropouts, five entries were released, none of which, to be perfectly honest, I have ever played:
~ Rimudora released two entries, Not In The Face (which actually, I think I did play; it was mostly a joke entry, made just to use one of the more ridiculous title examples Pepsi gave, I'd bet) and Mynorety Report. Though Mynorety Report featured a custom Zelda-type system, neither did particularly well on the votes. Both suffered huge penalties by leaving out the textfile information that every Epic Marathon has required, as well as leaving out all the described locations, but in the end, their position in the rankings wouldn't have changed without the penalties.
~ Leroy_Leo released The Mysterious Rogue, an apparent culmination of the things he'd learned working on his game for the second Epic Marathon.
~ RedMaverickZero released Ties of Chaos, a game, I, to be honest, hadn't even heard of before researching for this article. It hasn't had the staying power of other games in his repertoire, though it did get more votes than the other games in this contest.
~ It however, came second to Moogle1's Darkmoor Dungeon, a game that is still hailed as one of the designer's greatest, Darkmoor is a collection of the best boss battles you've seen in games, with a few original ones thrown in, and recently joined Surlaw Armageddon as one of the biggest OHR games among Brazilians. It was created as a standalone, where the connection to the series is only available after completing a subquest, but due to the various design missions it included, it easily overtook the lead Ties of Chaos had accumulated from votes.

And so, another Epic Marathon had closed. Another year went by. When Officer Buford made his debut at CP on April Fool's, no one thought much of it, even when his IP was confirmed as Pepsi Ranger's. When he was still around a week later, he was met with some scorn and paranoia, but the site had pulled April Fool's jokes that overstayed their welcome before, so we weren't sure what to think. As we went into May, his posts gained a more foreboding air. Something was happening, something big.

We all know now what that something was, but how hush-hush the whole deal was at the beginning is still pretty impressive. Pepsi's shown me his logs of the behind the scenes planning of the thing, and even a lot of the people who were involved didn't know what was up, only that it was a lead-in to the fourth Epic Marathon. The only people who knew the full story before it was revealed were Pepsi Ranger himself and James Paige, but the work the two of them did with Inferior Minion to set up all the clues was pretty impressive.

I've spoken about Who Shot Bob The Hamster? in this magazine before, but let me give you the full story now, straight from someone who was there. The clues were set up June 1st, but the first two had a slow-going. I sat back and waited to see how it would play out. Jack found the first clue in the Security Center, but most people weren't going at it the right way, until Artimus Bena came in and solved it. That was all I needed, to see the basics of what I was looking for and how I'd find it. Within two days, I'd found a majority of the clues with my sharp wits, knowledge of detective stories, and general intelligence, but mostly just with CP's "Search" function. A few others helped fill in the blanks, most often Moogle1, but a stranger by the name of Dried Thorn dropped the solution to the one that'd been stumping us the most right in our laps. They'd all been found and put in order by the 11th, a little under two weeks. After that, it was all speculation of what the clues meant, mostly happening between each sleuth and Pepsi Ranger in private messages. Reading the behind the scenes document shows how hard we really did attack this deal, Pepsi was clearly surprised at how close some of us came to solving different aspects, and how we managed them. I'd got the motive out of an identity clue, Moogle1 was compared to the Rain Man (though this document mostly only has the one side of the conversation, so I couldn't tell you why), and the stranger Dried Thorn displayed a Sherlock Holmes-like quality that had the shooter on the run.

No one knew about Dried Thorn's brilliance until after the results were posted, being that all his findings were private, but the first time I read the clue solutions, I was pretty impressed. He had the location down pat, including a rundown of where each shot was fired. He found a secret, until now undocumented clue that directly linked the contest with Lineality, but dismissed the game as another clue rather than the culprit because it lacked any definable characters to commit the crime. As far as actual entries go, this contest was pretty lacking, but the variety of methods used to create those entries is interesting. Pepsi encouraged each sleuth to make a game to add all our sleuthing points to, and Moogle1 made a short comic suggesting Zombie Robot Bird Hitler as the culprit, which was retroactively titled Who Shot Bob The Hamster: The Graphic Novel. I made the first deadline with an outline of a detective story about the mystery, by the second I had the story written.

Lemme give a little background here. In summer of 2004, at the same time I hadn't entered the second Epic Marathon, I had the idea of a private investigator in a film noir setting who spoke aloud the conventional narration throughout the story. Nepenthe and I tried to make it for the 48 hour contest, but computer issues and the fact that I had overestimated our ability to make that short deadline were our downfall. I'd tried revisiting the story a few times, but it never made it. By the time the fourth Epic Marathon came around, I thought it would be perfect for the character, and even worked in my own writer's block as a plot point. Thus, A Soliloquy Mystery was born. It was just a simple Notepad file with what would've been the title screen attached. My original plan was to make an OHR movie with illustrations, but laziness prevails. The story proposed that the whole thing was a hoax put on to motivate the community to action, with a poor red herring named Herr Ingred as the scapegoat.

Shadowiii had a pretty bold idea of making a game that could be entered in both the Epic Marathon and the Dating Game Contest, a contest inspired by a game he'd made a few years past anyway. Who Shot Bob The Hamster: Love + Order would've been a game where you took witnesses out on dates to get information out of them, and it would've been pretty cool. All of the witnesses were characters borrowed from other authors, with permission of course. What was released was far from finished, although much of the story was outlined in the textboxes, and Pepsi Ranger took that into consideration when he judged it for the design missions. The game is still unfinished, though Pepsi, talking mostly to Shadowiii, offered us another month to work on our entries, though it was declined as much more time would be necessary to make anything worthwhile out of the mess.

Among all of this, OHR House 2 came back from the dead to give its own take on the case, whether it was intended to be entered or not. From the Week 6 results to the end of Week 8, the housemates had a murder mystery of their own on their hands, which Surlaw narrowly escaped prosecution for when SDHawk finally admitted to the crime. The motive in this one involved, again, inspiring the community to get off its collective asses and do something productive.

After the votes were in and the points were counted, Dried Thorn won on clues, while my short story took the rest of the contest, being the only complete story in it. If I could've only solved four more clues I could've swept the whole thing, but that's what I get for not focusing on the case itself as much as what kind've story I could craft out of it.

And that leave us at today. The fifth Epic Marathon opened last month, and it could be the most unrestrictive contest in the series. The idea is to make a game, though OHR movies are encouraged, told in episodes For The OBC Network (I’d imagine that to stand for OHR Broadcasting Channel, except that then it would be a channel network?). What the entry itself is about is completely up to the author. In fact, YouTube videos and screenplays are also acceptable methods of entering. The only real restriction on what the entry is would be the inclusion of a "No Graphic Novels" rule. Whether that's because of the contest's theme relating to a medium that isn't friendly to comics or just inspired by the Epic Marathon's bad history of graphic novel entries is anyone's guess. I know it's funnier to assume the latter, though.

Another way the current contest is opening up the restrictions is by making the contest window coincide with the real-life television season, from late September to the end of May, simultaneously reinforcing the theme and doing away with the Epic Marathon's most common and crippling foe: deadlines. There are no excuses this time, guys.

In addition, if you've entered an Epic Marathon before or wanted to, one of the design missions includes finishing or drastically revising your old entries or creating a new entry for any of the contests other than the Magnus Sequel Marathon for a whopping 50 bonus points toward your entry this year! So get to work, everybody. I've already won two, I don't need to win a third, but that doesn't mean I'll let you take it easily. You'll have not one, but four Soliloquy mysteries to contend with. Don't let the length of the rules scare you away, they've always been like that, and there's a condensed version available this time, too!

Let's make it happen in a big way this year, folks, you've got till the end of May, so get cracking.
Number six is coming 'round in January, and who knows what Pepsi's got in store!