Lurker > Yesmar_

As the hour wore on, in violation of everything we thought we understood about vote trends, Mario would go on a tear, cutting hundreds of votes off the lead on the back of a sudden increase in total votes. Crono would try to keep pace as best he could, but Mario proved too much for him, winning every update by an average margin of over 100 votes. Needless to say, the board was losing its mind. Marios reputation for fair play, already in shambles after 2002, would be destroyed after this final hour, as cries of Cheater and Vote Stuffer echoed throughout the board. The most dramatic evidence of such malfeasance would be something that came to be known as the Male/Female Poll, a simple poll asking whether voters were male or female that had apparently been spammed across the Internet/AIM during this time frame. Allegedly, the poll was coded in a way that registered votes in the Mario/Crono poll on GameFAQS, and depending on which version of the story you read, both options would register a vote for Mario, or just the Male option did and the poll was being strategically spammed in male-dominated environments. Regardless of all the chaos and allegations however, as 11:40 PM drew nearer the question of whether or not Mario would take the lead by then was answered. No he wouldnt, not quite. But as that answer became clear, a new question began to be asked as well. What time would the poll end?

Now in theory, matches were supposed to end at 12:00 AM CST, right when the one for the next day began. What this rule didnt address however, were the incidences where a poll was put up early. Obviously, the fairest option would be to end the poll 24 hours after it was initially put up, but these conflicting standards had never been tested, because there hadnt been a match all contest where the final 20 or so minutes made a difference. Until now. As 11:40 PM CST drew near, the board breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that Mario was still too far behind. But this was a relief that quickly evaporated as the poll stayed up. And not just until the next update at 11:45, but afterwards. Ceej had made his decision: fair or not, the poll was ending as scheduled at 12:00 midnight. Needless to say, the board was furious, and had no patience for any distinction anyone might have been willing to make between starting early/ending late. 24 hours is 24 hours is 24 hours. As if Marios comeback wasnt considered underhanded enough, he was now being given one extra update to pull it off. But even with all the assistance, it would be hard. He was behind by 151 votes, and would have to pull off the biggest cut of the match to tie things up. Could he do it?....The final update came in, and it wasnt even close. Mario would make a cut of nearly *250* votes to take the lead, right at the matchs end, coming in just under the very delayed wire. And in what many people saw as one final indignity, the match stayed running five minutes after that, so that Ceej could look for any stuffed votes.

There have been matches in contest history that had a bigger reaction/more activity on the day of the battle. There has been no match in history however, that produced a more fiery aftermath than this one. From the moment the match ended the board exploded with anger and recriminations. The suspicious comeback, the extra time, the fact that the lovable underdog of the board had lost. Everything about this match provoked a backlash. While not everyone had been around to see Marios comeback in real time, as people trickled back online throughout the following day, they joined those that had been present in a tidal wave of attacks on Mario, as well as Ceej himself. This went on for several days, buoyed by a lull in the other contest matches, as people analyzed every suspicious update, came up with all kinds of theories, and pointed out that Mario had not actually won any single 24 hour segment of the poll. In other words, it was great. If Mario and Cronos rivalry had been tenuous going into the contest, after the events of August 24th, 2003, it was cemented for good as the definitive one in contest lore. The fact that it was a Nintendo/Square one was just icing on the cake. Crono would get his revenge the following year of course, but this match would bind the two characters together for the rest of their contest careers, establishing their roles in the grand contest narrative.

The degree of emotion that was produced (hell, still *is* produced) by the mere mention of this match remains unmatched, and that is why I have to put it on top of this list. Link/Cloud is often giving credit for saving the contests, and that might be true, but Mario/Crono II is the match that proved what exactly we needed to save. This match, and the enduring rivalry it created would be a proof of concept for having multiple contests. After youve already established where characters rank in terms of popularity, whats the point in having a contest again? Maybe have a second one to catch up with anyone you missed, but besides that, why keep going on? Why not just end things there? Because theres more to the contests than just filling out a bracket, then checking a box. There is history, there is drama, there are rivalries. There is the love for the experience generated by all of us fans, both when our favorite entrants win, and sometimes, just as much, when they lose.

The anticipation for the match did not go unnoticed by Ceej, who gave us, in an unfortunately fortuitous decision, a little treat. Nowadays we are used to a degree of regimentation when it comes to contest matches. They automatically start at the same time every day throughout the contest, down to the exact second when the hour ticks over. The match, and its relevant pic(s), are up and ready to go right when that moment hits, and it is a big deal when the opening of the match goes awry, there is something not in place, or there is some kind of delay in the start of the poll. That wasnt the case back in 2003. Each new match was supposed to, in theory, start at 12:00 AM CST, but this wasnt a process that Ceej did manually. It wasnt automated, and so the start times werent always precise, sometimes off by a couple of minutes in either direction. Also, when there was a particularly hyped match on deck, Ceej would start the match up to 20 minutes early, allowing us all to get to the excitement that much earlier. This practice would end up repeated for the most anticipated match in the entire contest, and Mario Vs. Crono 2003 would officially start at around 11:40 PM CST, a time that would live in infamy.

Crono might have gained the backing of the board in the weeks leading up to the match, but some traditions never change, and Mario would take the initial lead as the Board Vote started to roll in. He would not remain in control of the match for long however, and within 30 minutes of the polls start, Crono would take off, gaining the lead himself by 12:30 AM CST. The Night Vote would prove to be very favorable to Crono, who broke 51% less than an hour after moving ahead and who would go on to see hundreds of votes added to his lead as the night wore on. By 2:30 AM CST, his lead had broken 500 votes and his percentage would begin to stablize just under 51.5%, hardly an insurmountable number, but one that Mario would have to work to overcome with the Day Vote. As the Night Vote reached its peak, so did Cronos lead, eventually rising to 749 votes at 5:15 AM CST. But unfortunately for Crono, the Morning Vote was about to begin on the East Coast, and the kiddies had just started to wake up.

Mario got to work on his comeback almost immediately, and just as steadily as Crono had built up his lead overnight, Mario would start tearing it down. There was nothing dramatic about his comeback, but there didnt have to be. He had plenty of time to work with, and a steady pace was enough to take off 749 votes, especially in a match that was looking to finish with well over 100,000 votes total. Slow and steady would be Marios M.O. throughout the early morning hours, and then, around 9:00 AM CST, when the lead was finally in sight, Mario would gobble up the rest of the lead in one massive gulp, making a huge push throughout the hour to take off the last several hundred votes, and then start building up a several hundred vote lead of his own. Marios show of strength, while impressive, would also be short lived. In less than an hour, Crono would make his first cut, and by 11:30 AM CST, Crono was starting to come back in earnest. As noontime rolled around, Crono would repeat the actions of Mario three hours earlier and make a mad dash for the lead, swallowing up votes with some of the biggest pushes we would see all match, eventually triumphing on the 12:30 PM CST update, Marios time in the lead having lasted a mere 2 hours and 45 minutes. This kind of back and forth was exactly what we had been waiting for, and the board sat waiting in anticipation to see if Mario would be able to strike back with the remaining Day Vote. And while Cronos pace would start to slow once he was safely back in the lead, there was no second wind for Mario. The Morning Vote had been his best shot at putting some space between himself and Crono, and it ended up being not quite enough. We werent experts in Vote Trends at this point, but we knew enough to realize that as the afternoon wore on and Crono kept adding to his lead, the match was essentially over. The evening hours were sure to be good to Crono. That was, after all, the same time frame that Magus had used to secure his lead over Ganondorf just a couple weeks earlier in another Nintendo/Chrono Trigger nailbiter, and, most importantly, this was when Crono had launched his 1,000 vote comeback against Mario in 2002. The only difference was that this time there was no comeback to be had. Crono was already in the lead, and he was going to stay there.

Once this realization kicked in, a sense of stunned calm settled over the board, or at the very least over the discussion of Mario/Crono. Mario, Mr. Video Gaming himself, had lost, and not just to someone else iconic like Link or even Cloud, but to Crono, someone without nearly as much name recognition in the wider gaming world. Even though many people had thought it might happen, even predicted it, is was kind of shocking to actually see it play out in reality. It felt like a titan had fallen, and now that the biggest debate of the contest had been settled maybe we could all move on a little and put the fanboy wars away. Myself and many people logged off for the night thinking that we would come back on tomorrow to find a message board that was starting to die down for the year, that had finally started to put some its drama to rest.

Mario, however, had other plans. As the evening wore on, Crono showed no sign of slowing down, but he didnt really speed up as expected either. He settled into a holding pattern with 50.3X% of the vote, and gradually built his lead to just over 800 votes. Mario would occasionally make a cut here and there, and initially, the 10:15 PM CST update where Mario cut 26 votes off the lead was considered more of the same. But then, at 10:30, with just over one hour left to go in the match, Mario took a larger bite. A shockingly high 88 votes had been taken out of the lead in that update, much too high to blow off as random variation. Something serious had happened in the last 15 minutes, but there was no reason yet to think that it was anything more than a fluke, or that anyone needed to worry. We would find out in the next update what was really going on. Well, when the next update arrived, it didnt just cause people to worry. Instead, it caused an all out panic, as this time Mario had cut over 100 votes off Cronos lead. There is a rule of thumb about cuts which goes: Ones a fluke, twos a coincidence, and threes a trend, and the 10:45 update confirmed that we had one hell of a trend on our hands. Out of nowhere, in the middle of what was supposed to be Cronos best time, Mario was coming back, and he was coming back by a lot. There were four updates left in the match (one of which would only last 10 minutes), and if Mario was able to pull off the same level of cuts, he would wind up just under 200 votes shy of victory. If he was able to keep increasing his pace howeverwell, all bets were off, and one of the most intense final hours in contest history was officially underway.

There is a bit of reverse psychology superstition that I would engage in when checking on the results of close matches back in the day. Back before broadband or smartphones, back before I was connected to the Internet 24/7, match results were something that I could only access on a periodic basis. Whenever there was a close match where I was rooting for a character that was certain to lose, when I checked the final results the next day, I would always say to myself Lets see how much ______ won by, the blank standing in for the character I had hoped would lose, but which seemed certain to be the winner. In my heart, I was hoping that a miracle had happened after I signed off for the night, but in my head I knew that was impossible and was a foolish thing to wish for, so making myself say this phrase and acknowledge reality gave myself permission at the same time to hold on to a delusional hope. This superstition never worked. Never worked that it is, except once.

1. Mario vs. Crono (2003) R3

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/458975e8.jpg

Mario 50.05% 66571
Crono 49.95% 66434
TOTAL VOTES 133005
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Mario_vs_(4)Crono_2003
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1357-south-division-semifinal-mario-vs-crono

When the 2003 bracket was first released, it came as no surprise that Mario was in a rematch. He had had a divisive run in 2002, and people were eager to see if he could repeat it on a more level playing field. What was a surprise though was the exact rematch that was set up. Why Crono? His match with Cloud was the big one, the controversial one. I dont think I was alone in initially thinking that Ceej had made a mistake in not setting up that one instead. Wasnt it the obvious choice? Well, that might have been the more obvious choice, and I cant know for sure why Ceej didnt set it up, but we should all be thankful that he didnt. In one of those fortuitous coincidences that have cropped up throughout the decades, this was the match that was set up instead, and with it was created the most iconic contest rivalry of all time. Mario/Crono. Nintendo/Square. It all played out in spectacular, somehow even more controversial, fashion here.

Despite those initial misgivings about the exact setup that was engineered, the battle would eventually become the marquee matchup of our second contest. Links victory in 2002 had been so overwhelming that there was little debate as to whether or not hed be able to pull it off again, and so in some way Mario/Crono was considered the climax of contest. There were still a couple of debateable matches that would remain afterwards, but as the hype for the contest grew and grew, it soon became clear that all roads led to Mario/Crono. The match wasnt quite able to reach the hype levels of Mario/Coud from the previous year; knowing what we now knew about the strengths of the two characters, there was no presumption that a victory here would decide the entire tournament. However, in the apparent absence of any serious debate on the winner, this match gobbled up much of the conversation that would ordinarily be devoted to the latter rounds, and there was certainly a lot of it to be had. The two characters had fought each other to a standstill in 2002, and there was no reason to believe they wouldnt do so again. There was little that had changed for either character in the meantime, and while their previous Semifinals match had arrived with rounds worth of baggage, momentum, and drama they would be meeting two rounds earlier this time, with a clean slate. Whatever went on in 2002 with stuffed votes, residual Planet Gamecube runoff, etc., was gone this time. This would be a fair fight, and whoever won it, would be considered the more popular one for good. The debate between the two wasnt just an academic one; it became personal as well, with board members rallying around not just who they thought would win, but who they wanted to win. While his struggle with Cloud might have been the more monumental one, Marios match with Crono in 2002 was rechristened as the birth of a rivalry, and much like rivalries in sports or elsewhere, the two sides became hotly divided. The Nintendo faithful came out for Mario of course, and the Square faithful did for Crono as well, although Crono received additional support from those who just liked rooting for the underdog, something which the board soon embraced. Mario remained the favorite in most peoples brackets, but the boards heart lay solidly with Crono.

Much like they had been one year earlier, all eyes were focused on the first two rounds of Mario and his rival, trying to glean as much insight as they could from these initial results. Unlike 2002 however, Mario got off to a strong start, scoring a near 90% victory over Captain Olimar. It wasnt the first blowout hed ever pulled off, but it was the first one hed pulled off against a character he didnt share a series with. SFF or no, the match with Olimar served as proof that Mario could blow out fodder with the best of them, and he seemed to have possibly shaken off his anti-votes for good. Crono would follow up with a blowout of his own on Tom Nook, but one whose scale was a little more expected. If things were looking good for Mario coming out of Round 1 however, Round 2 would be a completely different story. Marios second opponent of the tournament would be Shadow the Hedgehog, coming fresh off of his own very impressive upset over Wario in the First Round, where he didnt just win but almost doubled Marios purple rival. Despite Shadows apparent strength, predictions were relatively high for Mario ahead of their match, with an average of 70% in the Oracle, and not a single person predicting a number below 60%.

When Mario/Shadow finally met, Mario would end up coming in not just at the lower end of expectations, but far below even the most pessimistic numbers, managing a mere 55% when all was said and done. This was barely above what most people would have predicted Mario to get on Sonic himself, and was truly a shocking result. Even retrospectively it still stands out as one of the more confounding results weve ever seen, especially as Shadow never looked to be near this level ever again. Regardless of the reasons for the underperformance though, it was a bad sign, a bad sign that was made even worse when Crono struck back the following day in his match against Kefka in a match that played out in the exact opposite manner. Predicted to get 68% against Kefka, Crono beat that number by 10 points, pulling off a massive 78% against the hyped newcomer. While this match would go on to become one of the initial pieces of evidence for SFF, much like with the Mario/Shadow match, none of that mattered in the mid-contest fog of war. Mario had massively underperformed while Crono had massively overperformed, and thats all that mattered. In the space of 48 hours, the momentum had completely reversed, and to the surprise of many, Crono was the one entering Round 3 as the odds-on favorite. And while people might have become increasingly unsure about the ultimate winner, there was one thing that people were sure about: the match was going to be close.

Much like DK in the previous round, Sonic was able to use the Day Vote to his advantage, dominating that time frame as soon as the sun started to rise. The back and forth of the polls opening quickly became a memory as Sonic built up a very solid lead throughout the daytime hours, breaking 1,000, and then 1,500 votes as the poll entered the evening hours. The match was even on pace to avoid being the closest of the contest, Sonic breaking 51% at some point, Im guessing, in the afternoon. Despite taking control of the match, however, the board considered Sonics lead to be tenuous, and the mass refreshing of Aya/DK returned. We had relatively few previous matches to draw on at this point, and none between characters of this caliber, so Sonic leading with 51% was just as nailbiting as if he had led by 50.1%. We had no clue what to expect, and as the match entered a holding pattern, we hung on to every slight movement, waiting to see if there was another shoe left to drop. By 10 PM EST, Sonics gains had come to a halt, but with only three hours left to go, he was sitting on a lead that was just over 1,500 votes, and despite her strength in the opening hours, Samus had seemed to run up against a barrier she couldnt move past, the barrier of time. Pulling off a 1,500 vote comeback in three hours at the very end of a poll is something which, in hindsight, should have been impossible. The problem of course was that this was our first contest, and Samus didnt know yet what impossible was supposed to be.

With only three hours left to go, Samus would unleash one of the fastest comebacks we have ever seen, working at a speed that would have put Sonic himself to shame. Samus has never been a particularly strong Night Vote character, but that was not the case here, as in the final hours of the poll she chopped hundreds of votes off the lead minute by minute, hour by hour, until suddenly, in the blink of eye she had the lead. The board, already on pins and needles from earlier in the day went insane at the comeback, refreshing the main page so much that one of the servers crashed, forcing Ceej to implement poll updates (15 minute ones) for the first time in history. Samuss newfound lead was not secure though, and the final minutes of the poll saw a rapid fire back and forth between the two characters, the lead seesawing up and down as the seconds ticked by. If the opening of the match had proved to be unexpectedly dramatic, that would be nothing compared to the ending, with everything coming down to who happened to be in the lead when the poll finally closed. And to the surprise of many, that character was Samus, by the mindboggingly slim margin of 34 votes. While many records from the first contest would be broken almost immediately, this one would hang on for a bit longer, only being broken three contests later in the Summer of 2004. The other (near) record breaking element of the match of course was the votals. The match had received 83,000 votes in a mere 22 hours, only 2K behind the numbers that Jill/Link had pulled off in a match that lasted 26. If the drama of the match had not been evidence enough, these votal numbers were proof that we were dealing with something more massive than we had previously expected, and that the scale of the contest had changed for good.

Samuss surprising win and massive comeback had produced a storm of cheating allegations, and for the first time of many, Ceej would have to come onto the board and assure people that any attempts at cheating had been minimal, the results were valid, and Samus would be declared the official winner of the match, something which, while expected now, was not initially taken as a guarantee in a match as close as this one. Of course, once it became clear that the cheating accusations were going nowhere, a new controversy emerged: Rallying. While Mario/Cloud would be where the drama over outside interference reached its crescendo, this match would prove to be the genesis of our eternal debate.* As people searched for explanations for Samuss performance and failed to find definitive proof of cheating, they focused on the next best (worst) thing instead: evidence of rallies. And Im not talking about the kind where a popular site links to GameFAQS on its front page. People scoured the Internet and exposed any evidence of rallying they could find, even if it was on an obscure message board with tens of members. There was also the drama over the polls delayed start. With two hours of the poll essentially missing, there was much speculation as to how that had affected the final result. There was never any clear consensus drawn as to whom the reduced time frame benefited, but as the matchs winner, Samus took much of the heat. Samus was Public Enemy Number 1 for a time, and while thats mostly faded away by now, its a testament to how intense and controversial this match was. Its fascinating to read Stats Topic posts from the aftermath of this match, as people struggle to work through explanations for things like rallying or vote trends. Not just in an attempt to understand how these things worked, but on a conceptual level. People from other sites can be encouraged to vote? The percentages in a match can shift? All those were lessons to be taught, and the match that started that teaching would turn out to be one of the greatest we have ever had.

*Although honestly, looking back through the old Stats Topic from this time, people were complaining about Penny Arcades link on the day of Jill/Link. Even just having increased votals due to an outside link was considered offensive to some!

2. Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Samus Aran (2002) R3

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/b/bb299bd9.jpg

Sonic the Hedgehog 49.98% 41939
Samus Aran 50.02% 41973
TOTAL VOTES 83912
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Sonic_the_Hedgehog_vs_(5)Samus_Aran_2002
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/994-west-division-semifinals-sonic-the-hedgehog-vs-samus-aran

Turning points can be hard to judge. Trying to figure out which one of a series of similar matches was the one to change the sites trajectory for good can be a difficult endeavor. How do you decide which one of L-Blocks matches was the point of no return? Can you? And thats a situation where we have a specific group of matches to analyze. When it comes to all the ways in which the contests have progressed over the years, it can be hard to nail down even a group of matches that led to a particular evolution, let alone one singular result. That is not the case here. This match was not just *a* turning point, it was *the* turning point in the history of the contests, the fulcrum around which the rest of contest history swings. The discrepancy between what came before and what came after is so great that the first month and a half of 2002 doesnt just feel like a different contest year, it feels like a completely different kind of contest. Aya/DK might have been the first exciting contest match, but Sonic/Samus was the match that turned the Summer Contest into a true event, more than just a series of polls.

And initially at least, very few people saw it coming. When it came to anticipated matches, the two days after this one were the ones that were supposed to mark when things finally kicked into high gear. Mario/Cloud had been hyped from the very beginning, and the Mega Man/Sephiroth match the day before had quickly become one of the most watched matches on the calendar as well. But move one day further back than that and there wasnt much discussion to be had at all. It was widely expected to be a win for Sonic, the only question was by how much. Now I know that based on the odds and final prediction percentage for this match that Sonic and Samus must have actually had pretty equal amounts of users backing them, but that wasnt the vibe on the board. I dont know where Samuss supporters were, but it certainly wasnt Board 8. Sonics win wasnt a fait accompli, and someone that proposed Samus might win instead wouldnt have been laughed off the board or anything, but there simply wasnt that much discussion when compared to some of the other matches yet to come. Both characters had hit their marks as expected in R1 (although Sonic only managing 82% against a blob of pixels seems a little disappointing in hindsight), and then gone out and put up similar numbers in their Round 2 matches against Tidus and Ryu, both entrants that were considered possible threats to upset in their own right. There was no reason to believe that any of the facts on the ground had changed, and while Mega Man and Sephiroth had both demonstrated that they might be too much for Sonic to handle in the Divisional Finals, he was still on track to make it to that point. Our little contest had provided some upsets here and there, but to see a gaming legend like Sonic lose to a character that hadnt starred in a game for eight years was a bridge too far for many. The problem with all this analysis of course was that our little contest was about to get a little less little.

The first sign that news of our events had traveled outside the borders of GameFAQS happened the day prior to this match, in the aftermath of Pac-Man/Scorpion, when Penny Arcade posted a webcomic mentioning the contest. While the comic came one day too late for its intended of purpose of reversing Pac-Mans shocking loss to Scorpion, it was the first outside source to draw attention to the contest. Whether due to the Penny Arcade factor or not, the match being held that day (Jill/Link) would go on to finish with 85,000 votes, roughly 10,000 more than the previous high water mark for votals. While a couple thousand of that is due to the match running over, even those adjusted numbers still put it a step above even the best of what we had seen before. We were on the verge of entering a new era, and the aforementioned Pac-Man/Scorpion match (68,000 votes) would be the last 24 hour, above-the-fold match to fall below 70,000 votes for 9 years. The last 7 weeks had been nothing more than a preview of sorts for what would become a decade of contests, and the main attraction was about to begin.

Or well, er, it was supposed to begin. Due to a glitch or some other unforeseen issue, at 12:00 AM CST, the poll failed to update. Jill/Link remained open for voting for several more hours, until eventually, two hours after the scheduled start time, Sonic/Samus finally got underway. In one of those coincidences that stalks the history of the contests like a hunter stalking their prey, the first match to feature a delayed opening would also wind up being the first match where every second did truly count. As a massive board favorite, Sonic got off to an early lead in the match, but perhaps due to the delayed opening and reduced board vote, he wasnt able to hold onto it for long. Samus quickly struck back, moving slightly ahead and holding onto a narrow lead for the first several hours of the poll. Still, the match was essentially a 50/50 affair over these opening hours, and the board regulars who had stuck around to watch the late opening sat gobsmacked, monitoring the barely changing results that showed, for the third time this round, a 1 Seed on the verge of being kicked out of the contest two rounds prematurely. And this wasnt some faded icon like Lara or Pac-Man. This was Sonic the Hedgehog, someone who was actually still relevant. And he was in for the fight of his life in a match thatwe didnt know the final result of? Was that possible?

Miserables

Final Two Schedule:

Wednesday, March 5th: #2
Thursday, March 6th: #1

The previous Ryu/Dante match also took place on the day of the 2003 Blackout, so if we ever get another contest and the two of them have a match set up, well, watch out, something big's about to go down.

I remember there was some rando who was very insistent that Ezio would beat Zelda, and refused to listen to/acknowledge any of the contest knowledge that we had.

This is from before my time, but wasn't Ryu the only/main character in SF 1?

Edit: Also, he's the main Japanese character so I assume that gave him a boost in Japan.

It's tail time!

it going?

gon

a b****

Clues for the Top 2.

#2. Took place on August 24th.
#1. Took place on August 24th.

As I said above, this match was occurring on the heels of 48 straight hours of madness, and passions were high right from the very start. Some contest traditions never change, and FFVII lost the board vote decisively, Mario initially holding onto a 55/45 lead, but Cloud would strike back in no time at all, managing to take the lead himself within ~ 1 hour of the poll being up. All throughout the First Night Vote and the Morning Vote, Cloud added to his lead which would rise to 1,000 votes by midday. It was beginning to look like Sunshine or no Sunshine, we were on the verge of what would be, if not the largest, the most monumental upset of the contest. But then, right when Mario looked to be at his lowest, he got an assist. The site Planet Gamecube, one of the biggest Nintendo news/fan sites on the Web at the time, decided to lend its support. A post went up on their front page, linking to GameFAQS, and encouraging its visitors to vote for Mario! On any other day this would probably would have provided a boost, but on one of Nintendos biggest days of the year the effect was equivalent to a force multiplier. Mario quickly got to work on a major comeback, taking hundreds of votes off of Clouds lead as the afternoon rolled on. And while Planet Gamecube might have been the most prominent example, it was not alone in rallying for Marios victory, with even smaller sites like vgmusic.com getting in on the action. As the hours wore on, Clouds lead narrowed, and we were faced, for the second time in three days, with a potential photo finish.

In what should be no surprise, the board absolutely exploded at all of this. There have been many board explosions over the years, but the one produced by this match might very well be the largest we have ever seen. There were ~300~ pages of topics by the end of the day, which at 20 posts per page (what I believe most people used at the time) gives us 6,000 overall topics, 1,000 more than we had on the afternoon of L-Blocks victory, the only other day I have easily available information for. In the midst of all this chaos however, Marios comeback finally started to lag, just a couple hundred votes shy of victory; the rallies might not have been enough after all. However, as he has been known to do at times, Mario got a second wind, a second surge of votes that put him finally into the lead, with only the evening vote left to go. This was a time period that had produced drastic vote shifts in two of our previous three close matches, but there was none of that here. Cloud didnt snap back into control, but neither did Mario. The Nintendo icon stayed just barely in the lead for the last several hours of the poll, only a couple hundred votes ahead, always vulnerable to a sudden rush from Cloud. The site sat waiting as it always does in moments like this, waiting, desperate for someone to make a move. But this time, no one did, and Mario would inch his way past the finish line, winning the match by a mere 277 votes.

Needless to say, the match lived up to the hype, getting a massive 129,000 votes, almost 30,000 more than the next most popular match in the contest. Not only had the match played out in the most exciting way possible, it would generate some of the most controversy we would ever see. As can be seen by the discussion in these topics over the past several months, there is no topic that is more divisive or does more to rile up peoples emotions than rallying. And there was no rallying discussion (well, argument) that lasted as long or that got as heated the ones over Planet Gamecube. The Summer Contest had ignited a passion in many of us, and we were developing strong opinions for the first time about the way it all played out. What are the contests for? What makes them fair? What makes them fun? These are foundational questions that have been rolling around in topics and posts for decades by this point, but all of these foundational questions come back to the aftermath of this match. We were feeling our way through the wreckage and creating the language we would use to talk about the contests for years to come.

This matchs legacy would be secured for all the reasons listed above, but to all that, Ill add one more. It should never have happened! Theres been a degree of retrospective analysis done on the 2002 Contest in subsequent years, once we had the statistical tools to do so, and what always comes up when one crunches the numbers is that Cloud should have won easily, not gone 50/50 with Mario! Sure, you can blame some of that on Planet Gamecube, but the match was already close before the rally was posted. Was it all the Sunshine Factor? Was it bracket votes coming through for Mario in the end? Who knows, but this discrepancy would leave the match with an aura of mystery, not only something that could never happen again, but something that never should have happened in the first place.

3. Mario vs. Cloud Strife (2002) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/73ea68ac.jpg

Mario 50.11% 64990
Cloud Strife 49.89% 64713
TOTAL VOTES 129703
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Mario_vs_(2)Cloud_Strife_2002
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/996-north-division-final-mario-vs-cloud-strife

There are hyped matches, and then there are hyped matches. All this time later, with twenty extra years worth of backstory and precedent to draw upon, there has still never been a match that was able to generate as much hype as this one. This showdown between Mario and Cloud from all the way back in Contest #1. When it came to the first contest, we didnt quite know what to expect for a lot of things. We had no concept or framework for how the matches would play out, whether theyd be something that you checked in with once a day, saw the results, and moved on, or whether theyd be all day, back and forth, affairs. The fact that a match could be exciting was not something that was taken for granted like it is nowadays and there was no reason yet to think of contest matches as anything more than puffed up Polls of the Days. Dont get me wrong. There was a ton of excitement generated by the contest of course, but the excitement came from making predictions and seeing where everything ended up, not necessarily in the manner that the actual poll played out. Despite all this though, we could tell that this match was different. If there was one match that we knew would dominate our attention for all 24 hours it was occurring, it was Mario Vs. Cloud.

The appeal behind the match was obvious, and initially at least, it was considered to be by far the most important matchup in a bracket filled with important matchups. While it might not have been reflected in the overall prediction percentages, this was the match that, to the board at least, was potentially determining the winner of the entire contest. Mario was Mario of course. He would be the obvious winner for the inaugural Character Battle on any gaming web site at any point throughout history, and that was certainly the case here as well. Cloud might have been a more unconventional choice, but to anyone who properly understood the culture of the site, he made perfect sense as well. FFVII was the game that essentially built GameFAQS and whether the sites users first came here for help with the game or not, its legacy loomed large over the site. To anyone with their ear to the ground the importance of FFVII was clear, and anyone that doubted Cloud did so at their own peril, as to the voters of GameFAQS he was almost as iconic as Mario was. Before we even knew how intertwined the Nintendo Vs. Square rivalry would be with the future of the contests, we knew that there was an existential statement being made with the result of this match.

And for the first several weeks, things were not looking good for Mario. Marios underwhelming victory over Servbot wasnt really considered that underwhelming on the day of the match; after all, we had nothing else to compare it to. That perspective changed real soon though after Clouds first round victory over Fox. This wasnt a debated matched exactly, but there was actually a decent amount of dark horse support for Fox at the time, so for Cloud to come in and blow him out of the water was a surprise. And to do so by an even larger margin than Mario had done against Servbot marked a laying down of the gauntlet for their upcoming R4 match in a major way. In a vacuum, Marios performance against Servbot was fine, but when compared to Cloud, it seemed severely lacking. We didnt need the framework of the Xstats to eyeball the two characters opponents and determine which one of them was facing stronger competition. And then, in R2, the comparison became even more lopsided. Mario just barely managed to double Morrigan, not exactly a character with the biggest name recognition, while Cloud completely laid into Pikachu, not only surpassing his numbers from the previous round, but coming close to 80/20ing the Nintendo icon. Yes, there were explanations for both these results. Morrigan had had a particularly strong R1 while Pikachu had had a particularly weak one. However, the comparisons were hard to ignore, and Mario was quickly falling out of contention. As the obvious favorite, not just for R4 but for the entire contest, Mario had generated a lot of haters and anti-voters by this time, and seeing blood in the water they started salivating, creating a snowball effect that threatened to overwhelm any bracket advantage Mario might have going into the latter rounds. He needed something to come along and change the momentum. Change the momentum, and change it now, because otherwise Mario was heading for an earlier than expected exit.

Finally, in Round 3 Mario got a bit of good news, destroying Donkey Kong with over 80%, topping Clouds performance from any previous round. Cloud would have a solid victory over Alucard himself, but Mario had finally managed to stop the bleeding. Mario might no longer be the clear favorite in the next round, but neither was Cloud. In the boards eyes, the odds for the North Division Finals had reverted to the mean: 50/50 in both directions. The most hotly anticipated match since Day 1 had managed to remain that way all the way up to Day 50, and it was increasingly looking like anyones match to win. If only there was something that could give one of the two an advantage Of course, there was. It had not gone unnoticed that Mario/Cloud was set to take place on the release day of Super Mario Sunshine, the biggest Mario game in six years, and the first mainline Mario game since Super Mario 64. The hype for the new game, while not uncomplicated (Clean is cleaner than dirty!), was massive, and even when Mario looked shaky early on, the games release date was Marios ace in the hole. And aside from the assistance that the game gave to Marios contest hopes, it ratcheted up the hype on the site just that much more. As did the previous two days of matches, both featuring their own 50/50 showdowns between contest elites. A confluence of multiple different hype factors was converging on GameFAQS, and the only thing more shocking than all of this coming together was that the match somehow lived up to the hype.

Bill

I live in New Jersey, and take the bus into Manhattan all the time, so congestion pricing is more convienent for me. See? I can play the anecdote game too!

People should look the Did you Know section! It usually has one pretty crazy fact mixed in, although, this is a particularly crazy fact even for them.

Fat

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Huh?

It's on their front page in the "Did you Know" section.

No, I did not know mpreg enthusiasts' opinions on "ass babies," and now I wish I hadn't.

The split between Day/Night matches was also probably near its peak for Red/Ocelot since that was one of the first matches, and people might not have realized yet that there were two matches a day.

Who is the strongest character to never face a Noble Niner? Yuna? Geralt, I guess, but he's only been in one contest.

Waldo?

This reminds me of beating Viewtiful Joe for the first time last year. Every boss was initially: "Why can't I save right before the boss! This is such bad game design. I guess my run ends here!"

All worth it though for:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a16bbc63.jpg

IIRC, the Monkey Island game(s) had just been remastered shortly before that match, so that was probably the strongest Guybrush we've ever seen. Not that that's saying much.

kevwaffles posted...

Mitch may be an extreme case, but the situation at its core is yet another in a long line of congressman suddenly voting with a conscience once they're no longer worrying about reelection. And yet we'll never get term limits.

If we had term limits, then senators would still hedge their votes to secure their next lobbying jobs.

Nothing

We might have been barreling headfirst towards a tragic ending, but the final stretch of this match was one of the most thrilling moments in contest history. As you can tell, my list is very top heavy, biased more towards the matches of the earlier years, the ones that lit sparks in us that later contests struggled to do. It was always hard for the last decade of contests, even when they were at their best, to generate the excitement and stakes of the first couple of years. This match was an exception. For many, it was the first time in years (and for many the last time ever) that they would be emotionally invested in the results of a match. It showed people how much they actually did still care about this silly little online contest that had been part of their lives for a decade or more. Its just a shame of course that all that investment ended with the worst possible outcome. Just like how Odoacer sacking Rome wasnt *really* the Fall of the Roman Empire, this match wasnt *really* the End of the Contests, but its hard to avoid its symbolic importance all the same. And if things had to end in such a way, Im happy they ended with the board united as one, instead of split many different ways. Draven brought out the best in us in a way, as well as in Link himself. He might have lost the match, but Links performance in this match is, in my mind, the most impressive contest performance of all time. Much was made at the time of the absurdity of the board rallying for Link of all entrants to be our savior, but in hindsight, *of course* it would all come down to Link in the end. It couldnt have ended any other way.

Despite the ambivalence we had over rooting for Link going into the match, it was hard for the board not to support a comeback of this magnitude. As Links momentum grew, so did his support on the board, but things remained divisive. Some people scoffed at the idea of rooting for the most dominant presence our contests had ever seen, but it was also hard for the Link haters to find any other entrant to hold on to. Any underdog goodwill that Draven might have built up was squandered by the arrival/invasion of scores of LoL trolls, who took Dravens success as a source of bullying pride, making sure the entire board knew just how furious all of our butts were by their takeover of the site. We all went back and forth and back and forth, letting years of resentments pour out as the contest collapsed around us. But then, something happened that stopped all this arguing in its tracks, something that united everyone. GameFAQS was attacked.

Well, maybe. At around 12:30 PM EST, right as Link was starting to take off the next 1,000 votes of his comeback, the site crashed. Not entirely, but for the next hour or so the sites loading became very touch and go, and voting in the Character Battle, along with Links comeback, slowed to a crawl. To most observers, this downtime had all the earmarks of a DDoS attack, presumably by LoL supporters trying to halt Links rise. The exact details of how a DDoS works is beyond my level of comprehension, so Ill just quote Wikipedia, which says: Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. In theory, the Draven supporters were targeting GameFAQS with a massive amount of connection requests, thus overloading it and causing it to crash. When the site finally stabilized however, Bacon came on and denied that there was any evidence of a DDoS attack. In his telling, the sites servers had simply become overwhelmed due to the increase in traffic, and as the match happened to fall on Labor Day, the GameFAQS tech team was too short staffed to fix the problem immediately. He even posted graphs and statistics to back up his version of events, but that did nothing to sate the crowd, many of whom challenged the information he posted, arguing that it was in fact consistent with a DDoS attack, and not an ordinary increase in traffic as he claimed. As I just said, all this information is beyond me, so I cant really give a good opinion as to the strengths of each side, but for anyone interested, the Wiki article for the match contains excerpts of most of the relevant posts. It quickly became clear that in any case, the statistics didnt matter; the board had already made up its mind: it was a DDoS attack. This galvanized support for Link. It had been one thing to rally for Draven off site. But to quote Michael Corleone: IN OUR HOME? That was too much. The gloves were coming off.

Link would continue his comeback throughout the downtime and for a little bit afterwards, but during the afternoon the LoL rally, well, rallied and managed to add another 2,000 votes to Dravens lead by 5:00 PM EST. The board though, had other plans. The contest community had tended to shy away from mass rallying for our favorites, or at the very least tried not to be too obvious about it. Not (despite the meme) because we were out of touch and didnt understand how social media worked, but because the contests werent supposed to be about that. We were better than that. Well, with everything on the line, that kind of pretense and decorum went right out the window, and the board got straight to work trying to beat the ralliers at their own game. This is a board which, in those days, was notoriously argumentative and couldnt agree on anything, riven with feuds and animosities, but on this afternoon at least we all moved in perfect harmony, united in a common purpose for probably the first time in our history: taking down Draven. We tried every gambit we could think of, called in every favor we could, turned over every possible rock to find somewhere to rally for Link. The Draven rally might have been centered on Reddit, but we reached out and roped in every social media network: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Someone with real world connections to a professional wrestler even reached out and convinced him to rally people to vote for Link live on television that night before his match. I dont know if that actually happened, as Ive never seen any footage of it, but that is the level we were operating at here. People were frantically trying to contact Robin Williamss daughter Zelda (named after the series) on social media, hoping that her or her father could send out a message of support. Finally, by 5:00 PM, all our efforts started to pay off and Links second comeback of the match began. Within 45 minutes, he had pulled 1,000 votes off the lead, and while he would never hit that pace again, for a while he was cutting 1,000 votes every 60-90 minutes, good enough to take back the lead.

And then, just before 10:00 PM, his pace lagged. He would only manage to take off ~300 votes over the next hour, with 1,500 votes still to go as we entered the final hour of the match. The board kept up the pro-Link rallies and cajoling as best we could, but in the end the most important of all our entreaties fell on deaf ears. As it became clear that Link probably wouldnt be able to pull it off, we started begging Bacon to make an executive decision. The poll had been essentially down for over an hour at the height of Links first comeback, and there was precedent from back in 2004 of rerunning matches that had glitched in some way. Couldnt the same be done here? Couldnt the poll be rerun the next day, with no outage this time, or at the very least extended for an hour to make up for the lost time? Bacons response to these requests was swift and unambiguous. No, the poll would not be rerun, because, despite the clear precedent, rerunning it would be unfair. Unfair to whom exactly, was unclear. Link would get a third wind in the final half hour of the poll, cutting deep into Dravens lead, but it was too late at that point. With 765 votes left to go, the clock would strike 12, and Link would be eliminated, the earlier downtime having made all the difference. Draven would go on to win two more rounds and be crowned contest victor, each one of his remaining matches giving us false hope in a completely different way before having the rug pulled out from under us yet again. But this match was, in a way, the climax to everything, both in terms of 2013, and to an extent for the Contests as a whole.

4. Link vs. Commander Shepard vs. Draven (2013) R3

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1fd6800e.jpg

Link 44.02% 53703
Commander Shepard 11.34% 13829
Draven 44.65% 54468
TOTAL VOTES 122000
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Link_vs_(2)Commander_Shepard_vs_(3)Draven_2013
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5253-character-battle-ix-division-1-final-link-vs-shepard-vs

If Link/Cloud was the match that saved the contests, this match, held almost 10 years to the day afterward, was the match that ended them. Not literally of course, as we would have four more contests after this one, but the cloud that was cast over everything after this match proved impossible to ignore. On some level, ever since L-Blocks rise and fall back in 07/08 we had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this was the match that finally did it. We had sat by and watched as Gamespot had a series of character contests meant to imitate ours, and as we saw them descend into rallied garbage year after year, we rolled our eyes at the chaos that would never happen to us. The kind of faux superiority we put on when observing them was always, on some level, masking an inner fear. The fear that the same thing would happen to us and the contests that we loved. We had dodged a bullet when L-Block turned out to be a one time only thing, and while several jokes/rallies had pulled off upsets and made runs in subsequent contests, they always burned out before the end. The center had continued to hold, but we could feel it weakening as the sky high votals we had seen for years finally started to drop off during GOTD, and then collapsed completely for the 2011 Rivalry Rumble. We were suddenly seeing the kind of votals that had last been seen in the earliest days of 2002, and while boredom would be the main enemy that year, the clear collapse of the site did not bode well for subsequent contests and for their potential to be overrun by outside forces. For the first time in ten years, 2012 went by without a contest entirely, and then in 2013, after a three and a half year gap, a new Character Battle was announced. Intended as a love letter to the board/contest community, Character Battle IX would end up heralding its demise instead. Devised with a sprawling, convoluted 3-way bracket format, the contest went forward seemingly in defiance of the sites decline and the inherent weaknesses of multi-way matches in an era of lower votals. The votals actually wouldnt be that much lower than 2011, but despite that bit of good news, the danger that lurked within the bracket became apparent almost immediately.

It took only four days for the first sign that we were in trouble to emerge, during an otherwise inauspicious first round match to see who would be the third wheel in the upcoming Round 2 Ryu/Mega Man X match. For the first six hours of the twelve hour match, it looked like that character would be Jak, finally winning a match for the first time in his contest career. However, at some point in the dead of night the League of Legends community caught wind of things, and put their rally abilities to work, leading to a massive ~5,500 vote turnaround for Draven, more than enough for him to safely win the match. What we had just seen was extremely worrying. This was a LoL rally far from full strength, and it had managed to pull off an exponentially larger rally than we had ever seen in a contest before, and the implications were clear. This was not some silly 4chan lark; it was an existential threat. And while we all knew it, there was little we could do in response, so as a survival mechanism, for the next month, we tried to put out of our heads what we had just seen. There was a lot of dissembling that happened, a lot of bargaining with ourselves, saying that maybe 5,500 was all the votes LoL could do. After all, hadnt Draven started slowing down towards the end? That wouldnt be enough to come close to winning, would it? These were all lies and excuses, but for the moment at least, there was nothing else to do. When the Second Round finally commenced, Dravens rally was initially nowhere to be seen, and there was a tentative degree of hope. Maybe Ryu and Mega Man X could build up a big enough lead in the first couple of hours to withstand another late night rally. This hope lasted all of 20 minutes however, before LoL fans discovered the new match, and unleashed a rally whose scale was almost beyond imagination. Draven didnt just get a couple thousand rallied votes, he got *tens of thousands* of rallied votes. Probably around 30,000 rallied votes in 12 hours, assuming my rough calculations based on the start of the match are correct. This was so massive that it didnt generate debate for the next round; in fact, it ended much of the debate. Link could have stood up against 5,000 or even 10,000 rallied votes. But 30,000 votes was just too out of reach with the collapsing votals of the site. He still had a shot at holding off the horde, but the Divisional Finals had become Dravens to lose.

One would think that with the fate of the contests hanging in the balance, the board would have been united in support of Link, but going into the match that wasnt really the case. To some people, Links dominance was just as much of an existential threat as the LoL rally was, and they gladly hyped up Draven and rooted for him to defeat the Nintendo icon. At least one person (Extha) even pretended to support Link and then psyched everyone out by revealing their vote was for Draven in the end. And plenty more just wanted to stay above the fray and vote for Shepard. In other words, if Link was going to take down Draven, hed have to rely on his own strength to do so; he wouldnt be able to count any additional support from the board. The match started, and if anything Draven was even more initially dominant than he had been in the previous rounds. This time the LoL fanbase had come prepared and Draven was in the lead right from the very start, no comebacks or turnarounds needed. Link held up better than Ryu and Mega Man X had in the previous round but that wasnt saying much; as the match went on, he fell thousands and thousands of votes behind. Link had seemed off his game this year, and the first 9 hours of this match were no exception. As dawn broke on the east coast, Dravens lead was well on its way to breaking 6,000, and while his gains were slowing, he was still gaining every update, and Link was falling further behind. And then, around 9:00 AM EST, Link started making cuts. While the cuts started off small, it didnt take long for Link to start taking bigger and bigger bites out of the lead, and it quickly became apparent that the LoL rally was collapsing. 6,000 votes was almost double the largest comeback we had ever seen in a contest before, but this was an entirely artificial lead whose collapse wouldnt be stunted or dulled by vote trends. Once Draven ran out of votes he would run out of votes, and there would be nothing left for Link to do but gobble up the rest. Within two hours, Link had come back by 1,000 votes, and it would take him just over an hour to take off 1,000 more. As the match reached its halfway point, Link was taking off 100 votes every update, a pace which, if he could keep it up, would give him the lead in just over 3 and a half hours. What we had all previously thought was the weakest version of Link we had ever seen was giving us his most impressive performance to date.

I just realized last year that "All That She Wants" by Ace of Base is not about a woman trying to get pregnant. "All that she wants is another baby" is just about finding a new lover.

(Somehow) Max Payne qualifies as well.

Liquid Snake qualifies as well.

Don't like this skin hat commercial. Don't like it at all.

"Elmo knows where you live!"

Null

This is my annual reminder that I'm bugged whenever people refer to the Oscar ceremony by the year it is being held instead of the year of the movies being honored. For instance, to me the "2024 Oscars" refers to the upcoming ceremony, not the one that was held last year. I don't recall when this changed, but I feel like it always referred to the year of the films when I was growing up, but it's increasingly becoming 50/50.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JADKlgXqjU

*Cue Frogs Theme.* Just as happened with Master Chief in the afternoon, Frog fought back and he fought back swiftly. This time he was the one pulling off near 53% (and even one 55%) hours, dominating the back stretch of the match and dismantling Chiefs newly established lead with ease. For the next four hours, Frog would be the one in control, erasing 600+ votes as if the last eight hours had never happened. Needless to say, the board was going crazy throughout all of this, Fogs Theme blaring from the speakers or headphones of anyone who was still up and following along. With one hour left, Frog regained the lead, and celebration ensued. However, this would not prove to be as smooth a crossover as the previous one. This time Chief would be the one determined not to go down without a fight, and the greatest final hour in a contest poll was about to ensue. For 60 heart stopping minutes, the two characters would remain locked in a 50/50 deadlock, the lead rarely rising above single digits. It was clear that this would not be a match determined by momentum. No, the winner would be determined by sheer luck; which character happened to be in the lead when the music stopped.

And that character would be, of course, Frog. By a mere *7* votes out of 91,041 cast, Frog had won. This would become the closest match of all time, a record that still stands 20 years later. The only match to ever display a 50/50 result, this would be a match that went down in history, both for its final result as well as for the legendary journey it took to get there.

5. Frog vs. Master Chief (2004) R2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/b/be60e6c5.jpg

Frog 50% 45524
Master Chief 50% 45517
TOTAL VOTES 91041
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(6)Frog_vs_(3)Master_Chief_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1756-20xx-division-round-2-frog-vs-master-chief

Its not always that lightning strikes twice for a series/game in our contests, and its even more unheard of for lightning to strike three times in a row, but that is exactly what happened with Chrono Trigger. Crono would make his debut in the first ever Character Battle, pulling off one of the greatest Cinderella runs of all time. The following year Magus would make his contest debut, itself full of drama, and would cement his place, no matter how fraudulent, as the strongest character not in the Noble Nine. And then, for Contest # 3, along came Frog, making his contest debut in the most dramatic way possible with one of the greatest contest runs of all time. Ive already written about his Round 1 match where he made his underwhelming debut along with the Round 3 match where he made a very impressive exit. But in between those two came this match, a match where Frogs performance was somewhere in between those two extremes, a balancing act which made the match all the more thrilling, and which catapulted it straight to the top of All-Timer lists for years to come. Frogs Theme would end up becoming the default theme music to any kind of exciting match, and while Frogs initial match certainly fed into that, this was the match that would cement that connection for good. The match that established Frog as the patron saint of close matches, the hero that the board managed to both want and need.

After Crono and Maguss successes in the first two contests, expectations were sky high for Frog going into 2004. The hype for him was not as high as it had been for Magus in 03, but it was pretty close, and just like Magus before, the board easily took him to win his fourpack. And then, an earthquake hit the board after Frogs first round match, a nailbiter which saw the amphibian just barely edge his way past fellow newcomer Liquid Snake. Suddenly his fourpack was up for grabs, and, shockingly, the other contender to take it was Master Chief. Despite a so-so debut in 2003, things were starting to trend in Chiefs favor the following year. A banner year for the Xbox had caused the sites resistance to the console to wane, and even despite GameFAQSs overall preferences it was hard to ignore the deafening hype for Halo 2 that was blanketing the gaming world at the time of this match. From the numerous marketing and advertisements to the mystery of ilovebees, the upcoming game was on everyones minds, and the Master Chief we saw in 2004 was clearly not the one who had almost blown it to Felix one year prior. As if to prove this point even further, Chiefs own Round 1 match featured a solid beatdown of Crash Bandicoot, who, despite being over the hill, had still shown some small semblance of strength in the previous two contests. If Frogs match had shown how vulnerable he was, Chiefs match showed just how capable he was of taking advantage of that vulnerability, and their Round 2 match had morphed in the boards mind from an easy Frog victory to what was looking to be one of the closest matches of the round. The board still had love for Frog, but what had they lost in him was faith.

And initially, that loss of faith appeared to have been misplaced. While Frogs weakness against Liquid Snake might have been obvious from the very beginning, there was none of that hesitation here, as the board favorite got off to a smashing start. Within 30 minutes he had blown past his biggest lead over Liquid, and it look a full 45 minutes for Frog to even drop below 60% of the vote. One of the most hyped matches of the Second Round was quickly turning into a bust as Frog more than fulfilled the promise we had seen in him going into the contest, and as it looked like, for a while at least, GameFAQS had remained cloistered from the hype over Halo 2. There was, of course, an obvious problem. Frog was front loaded. Like really front loaded, and practically from the start his percentage was collapsing. Initially, that didnt matter. When you start a match with over 60%, you have a long ways to fall before alarm bells start going off, and that was certainly the case with Frog. He was dropping in percentage steadily, but with the exception of a little hiccup during the peak of the European Vote, he was steadily increasing his vote lead at the same time. 2 hours and 45 minutes into the match, his lead crossed the 1,000 vote mark, and while his rate of increase slowed down during the morning, it never went away. Would his dropping percentage catch up with him at some point and eventually cross over into vote cuts for Master Chief? Possibly, but it was hard to see when that would be. 8:30 AM EST and Frogs percentage finally dipped below 55%, his earlier strength giving him a massive cushion, even as his freefalling percentage continued. Frog was starting to lose his hold on the match, but none of that mattered as his vote lead kept going up and up anyway, each second that he added to it being another second that Chief was losing, his time gradually running out. As we neared the halfway point of the match, Frogs lead would rise to a peak of just over 2,400 votes around 2:30 PM EST, while his percentage stoo at a very respectable 53.36%. Frog clearly had a lot of votes already banked, and as it turned out he would need them, because he was in for one hell of an ASV. The match might have been halfway over, but in some ways it was just about to begin.

When it comes to which series has the best ASV there has always been a debate between Kingdom Hearts and Halo, but with matches like this one under its belt, I think the winner is clear: the King of the ASV/Day Vote is Halo. With just over 50% of the match to go, Master Chief finally woke up and started to make cuts in earnest. And this was not some kind of back and forth that went on for hours before Chiefs momentum got going. Around 2:30/3:00 PM EST, it was as if a switch had been flipped, and Master Chief was off to the races. He wasnt just narrowly winning time frames over Frog either. By late afternoon, Master Chief was winning whole hours by 10%, going practically 55/45 with Frog all throughout the height of the ASV. Quite the improvement for a character who couldnt even get to 45% during the First Night Vote. It was one of the most dramatic turnarounds we had ever seen in a contest match, and it was all happening in a battle that was increasingly likely to become a 50/50 one. Or maybe it wouldnt be that close after all. Master Chief had taken down the lead at such a rapid rate, that a mere 5 hours after the comeback started, he had finished the job, and by 7:30 PM EST, he was officially pulling into the lead, with several more hours left to go before the ASV even ended. Master Chief would start slowing down around this point, but that wouldnt stop him from remaining in the lead, and adding to it as the night began. 100, 200, the numbers kept adding up, and by 10:05 PM EST his lead had grown to 643. Frog had started to make cuts into the lead here and there, but it was looking like an uphill climb for the Chrono Trigger fave. There were increasingly few votes left in the match, and unlike an entrant like Starcraft he had no obvious places to gain rallied votes form. The match would likely start shifting back into his favor any time now, but any comeback on Frogs part would likely end up just short.

Dancedreamer posted...

Seanchan posted...

diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, pronouns, transgender, non-binary, sogi

I am no longer allowed to use those terms at work. If we don't remove those terms from documents they will be permanently deleted. I now have to go through literally hundreds of documents to "sanitize" them so we don't lose them. Insanity.

Efficiency!

"Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"

Harvey

Of course, there is also the role that this match plays in contest lore as The Match that Saved the Contests. Would we have kept having contests for close to twenty years if this match had never happened? If Link had won two years in a row, would the continued existence of the contests have just seemed pointless, and led to an early retirement of them by Ceej? This is a popular school of thought on the board, and in one sense, I disagree. In the short term, this feels like revisionist history. No one at the time was making any calls to stop having contests because Link was too dominant, even when it looked like he was on pace to win for the second year in a row. Links dominance in 2002 had done little to dampen enthusiasm for 2003, and there was no indication that it was doing anything to dampen possible enthusiasm for 2004. There was still plenty left to be explored on the battlefield of the contests, regardless of how obvious the final result might be. There was no conception of missing out by having a dominant winner, because there was no legacy at that time of having anything else. And in any case, the next contest would have been Games, which FFVII would have won anyway. Would we have not gotten a Character Battle every year or even seen Link frequently removed from the bracket entirely? Possibly, but I think the claim that we would have stopped having contests entirely let alone regularly if this match had gone the other way is a bit over stated. What I think is undeniable however is the way in which this match colored the way we looked at future contests, the framework through which we analyzed them for years to come. It expanded the range of what was possible, and while I said at the beginning of the writeup that the match only became more unbelievable over time, that was part of its power. The unbelievable had happened once upon a time, and it could always happen again. No matter how unbeatable Link might have looked in later years, there was always the memory of this match sitting in the back of our minds, letting us know that there were no guarantees, that nothing was set in stone. We would have kept having contests even if Link had won, but would we have cared about them as much? Would we have sustained our passion?

6. Link vs. Cloud Strife (2003) R5

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e089391b.jpg

Link 48.39% 71438
Cloud Strife 51.61% 76199
TOTAL VOTES 147637
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Link_vs_(1)Cloud_Strife_2003
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1365-tournament-semifinal-link-vs-cloud-strife

Finally, the time has come for this match! Not the most exciting match of all time, but without a doubt one of the most important, if not the most important. A match whose legacy has become so imprinted within contest history that despite there being five others, if you were to say Link Vs. Cloud people would instantly know which one of their matches you were referring to. As shocking and unexpected as this match was at the time that it happened, it has become almost even more shocking in retrospect. A moment in time that would never be repeated. A moment in time that, despite its briefness, would influence the way we looked at contests for years to come.

First, the setup. Going into 2003, the influence of the first contest was less than youd expect. People made all kinds of predictions that went against what we had seen the previous year, partly because we had no knowledge of X-Stats, but also because people just didnt understand how transitivity worked in these things. The anything goes nature of 2002 hadnt yet dissipated, and we saw all kinds of crazy theories and discussions that people would have dismissed out of hand in later years. There was however, one exception: Link. Link had won the first contest in such a dominant fashion that there was little doubt among anyone paying even minimal attention that he would do it again. Ceej released the winner predictions for every character in the contest early on, and 42% of the site had Link as the victor, with no one else even above 10%. While its true that that still left a majority of the site picking a different character, for an entrant to have a 40%+ prediction percentage for a later round match, let alone the final one is extremely impressive. There were few guarantees this year, but one of the only ones was that Link would be winning the whole thing yet again.

And for the first three rounds thats exactly what it looked like would happen. The contest was still a blast, but there was a sense that everything would climax with Mario Vs. Crono, and then wed have a pleasant enough, but relatively perfunctory final week of matches leading up to Links second victory. In other words, no one was predicting the kind of sprint to the finish that wed seen in 2002, with its legendary 9 final days. Even with the contest almost over, there was no sense that anything had changed at the topline. And then Cloud doubled Sonic, sending shockwaves through the board, with Sephiroth following things up with a 60/40 beatdown of Mario the next day. Just like that, on a dime, everything had changed. The Link/Cloud semifinal match that we had given little thought to just a couple days earlier was now turning into the most important match of the entire contest. Link would remain the favorite on the board (being such a massive bracket favorite will do that for you), but his chances of winning the match had sunk to, if anyone was being honest, no better than 50/50. The fallout over Mario/Crono, which had consumed the board for the last several days, was quickly forgotten as it became clear that we were now barreling towards the Nintendo/Square showdown which would be the true climax of the contest. The winner of the contest, was, for the first time all year, up for grabs.

The match arrived and it would end up living up to the hype, at least in terms of impact. Cloud would pull off the upset without any trouble, Link only managing to lead for a little bit at the very beginning of the poll, with Cloud quickly striking back and remaining in solid control for the rest of the match. And so, without too much fuss, Link would be eliminated from the contest for the first time ever, and Cloud would go on to defeat Sephiroth by a similar margin in the finals, becoming a Contest Champion for the first and only time. Suddenly, (and I keep using words like this because that is honestly how this all felt) the top of the heap got a little more crowded. It was no longer Link standing alone; now he had Cloud and Sephiroth up there with him, merged into an entity dubbed Clinkeroth, which would be untouchable for years to come. What had happened? Even before this match was done playing out, we had seized on the source of the change: Kingdom Hearts Factor, possibly the most important, most discussed contest impact of all time. Apparently, the appearance of several Final Fantasy characters in the recent Square release had expanded their fanbase on the site, and given them all a boost in popularity. Now, in hindsight, the explanation that Cloud and Sephiroth (who only shows up in a boss fight) got such dramatic boosts solely from the game seems like a theory in need of some reevaluation, but at the time it captured the boards imagination in a powerful way. And in the end, the importance of Kingdom Hearts Factor was less about the mechanism of the popularity shift and moreso the existence of such dramatic year to year change in the first place. Kingdom Hearts Factor would be our first evidence that things could change, teaching us that what we had seen the previous year was not set in stone. Characters could and would change, sometimes dramatically, and the pecking order we had seen in 2002 was not what was always fated to be.

Bit.

I was so ****ed at that Duke pic. I had Charizard in my bracket, but I thought the pic would tip things over for Duke. Whoops!

Haste_2 posted...

Are you referring to the stat CJayC provided that indicated 65% of AOL (browser) users voted for Wind Waker? And he said 65% of users in "some" category voted for Starcraft, too... but I can't remember what it was (unless he was somehow able to identify which voters came from battle.net, in which case it could be that?)

I think the quote was something like, "65% of the Korean netblock voted for Starcraft. Just as unsurprisingly, 65% of AOL users voted for Wind Waker."

I'm guessing this a trick question and the answer is something for Game Boy, which would be the last system you'd expect.