This topic is to informally announce the next big GameFAQs contest. This contest aims to determine the Best Year in Gaming.
The way this contest will work is that we'll take each year in gaming from 1985 (release of the NES in America) through 2016, along with some wildcard entries from prior years (more on that below) and enter them into a bracket with 1 vs 1 matches between years. The game releases for a given year will be based upon the first NA release of a game only (so for example, Final Fantasy Tactics would be considered a 1998 release despite coming out in 1997 in Japan). Users will vote in the PotD as usual and the winning year will move on.
Since it's unlikely for most people to know which games came out in which year, we will be highlighting the most popular releases for each year in the artwork for the contest as well as providing lists with written writeups for popular games from each year as well. Of course, the users of this board will be more than welcome to create artwork and game writeups when we reach that point.
Circling back to the bracket. We chose to go with the most popular years on our site (1985-2016) as the foundation of a 32 year bracket. But we don't want to neglect the older years that brought some really important games to the industry, so we'll be doing a kind of battle royale to allow four of the older years to make it into the bracket in wildcard battles. Thus, the final bracket will be a 36 entry bracket with four wildcard entries trying to battle their way in for the first four matches.
More information will come as we prepare to formally announce the contest on the site, but I just wanted to give b8 the information first. As always, try to have fun with this thing!