LogFAQs > #983921425

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?