Board 8 > The 128 Greatest GameFAQS Contest Matches of All Time - The Top 20

(+) Yeah! (+)

2006 Sonic is one of my favorite contest runs ever

I had Sonic > Crono from the start so it felt great to get it right

I hated this one. Definitely the beginning trend for Cronos downfall, though Chrono Trigger got stronger with each year. I wonder how both would do today.

Sonic/Crono is my personal number 1.

Family were moving house, and there was a library across the street. I have like dozens of posts in the stats topic of me and it was all me running back and forth from the library to check the score as Sonic slowly dismantled the lead

Add to that that I predicted Sonic from the start and was steadfast in it and it was the most satisfying day in contests. Obviously to be perfect you'd need a nail-biting finish but I'm happy with the insane comeback.

12. Link vs. Cloud Strife vs. L-Block vs. Solid Snake (2007) R6

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/705bed9c.jpg

Link 29.74% 58100
Cloud Strife 24.49% 47834
L-Block 33.51% 65462
Solid Snake 12.27% 23964
TOTAL VOTES 195360
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Link_vs_Cloud_Strife_vs_L-Block_vs_Solid_Snake_2007
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2925-tournament-final-link-cloud-l-block-snake

GameFAQS, for many years, was an island unto itself. It wasnt that the site didnt mirror greater trends in both gaming culture and the Internet at large, or that we werent evolving the same as the rest of the world was. We just went at things at our own pace, with our own built in biases affecting the speed at which things moved. This was a site whose definitive gaming rivalry was Mario Vs. Crono after all. We were just built different. People talk about how old-fashioned GameFAQS is and how that drives people away, but what that conversation misses is that GameFAQS has *always* been old-fashioned. I joined the site in 2002, and I dont think there was ever a point at which people werent complaining that the message board system was horribly out of date. But for many users, thats what they liked about the site. Or at the very least they didnt mind it enough to leave. And this created a large, resident, userbase with unusual tastes that operated at a large enough scale to push back against some of the excesses of the rest of the Internet. On the rest of the Internet, the process of holding polls, or even running an entire contest oftentimes ran into problems. Griefers or trolls would frequently overwhelm voting, pushing some offensive or humorous option to the top, just for the lulz if nothing else. Time Magazine opened their Person of the Year decision to a public vote on multiple occasions, and on multiple occasions 4chan or some other group would sabotage the process, voting for someone like moot, and causing Time to just dismiss the results altogether. And then there were Gamespots own attempts at Character Battles, which almost immediately descended into rallying, trolling, and company promotion. While rallying has been a topic of contention, and has influenced matches from the very first contest, GameFAQS had managed to avoid being overwhelmed by it entirely, never suffering the descent into chaos that almost every other online popularity poll seemed to undergo. Why was that? Im not entirely sure, but it was at least partly due to the size of the site and the number of users regularly voting in our polls. The site might have been quirky, but it was also fairly massive, and for a while, that worked. The proudly old-fashioned users of the site were a buffer against some of the Internets trends, both toxic and otherwise, and the prospect of a contest being taken over by some kind of joke rally was out of mind. That just wasnt something that we did.

That is, until L-Block. Sure we had seen epic, non-joke runs like Crono in 02 or Starcraft in 04, but they always ran out of steam before the end, the proper order of the site always snapping back into place. These kinds of runs mattered at the margins; they didnt dictate contest winners. Even by 07 there was still a school of thought that characters didnt gain all that much strength from momentum. Maybe a little bit; a 55/45 match can be brought down to 50/50, but that was it. The idea that someone could go from being 60/40d by Kirby to challenging Link, based primarily on momentum and bandwagoning, would have gotten you laughed out of any discussion topic you brought it up in. Even a potential offsite rally would be limited in the amount it could swing, especially with the kind of votals we were seeing in 2007. But, previously unbelievable or not, this was the situation we had found ourselves in going into the Final Match of 2007.

L-Block had busted things up entirely, both in terms of brackets as well as in what we thought contest entrants were capable of. It had seemingly increased in popularity, not just once by a small amount, but by dramatic amounts each and every round. There was a theory at the time that said the issue was not so much that L-Block was increasing in strength but that there was 29% of the site that would vote for it no matter what, and so as its opponents got stronger, L-Block would appear stronger and stronger as well. I dont think anyone believes this anymore, but L-Block did get 29% every single round, so this made a kind of sense at the time. In any case, the end result was that L was getting stronger and stronger and stronger with seemingly no end in sight. And this increase in strength was only compounded by the outside attention that our contest was now receiving. We were used to various fansites posting a link to a GameFAQS match every now and then, but what we were seeing now went beyond all that. Major news sites like Kotaku were writing articles about the Tetris Block that was tearing through the bracket, one more story about an increasingly absurdist Internet that played by its own rules and enjoyed thumbing its nose at anyone who thought it could take things seriously. Like it or not, the lulz had finally come for us too.

Despite all that however, we still clung to our sense of normality. Going into the match, despite all we had seen the Block do, Link remained the predicted winner. But deep down, we all had an inkling of what was coming. Look at the Oracle picks. Pick after pick has Link tying with L-Block, or only winning by a few hundredth of a percentage points. These are the predictions that you make when you know the score, but dont want to admit it. On some level, we knew what to expect, what L-Block had done before, but no one was quite prepared for the insanity that was unleashed when the poll finally began. We had grown used to L-Block putting up absurd numbers at the polls start, but these ones were otherworldly. It was pushing 60% one minute in, and even at the freeze it had 54.99% of the vote. Against Link. And Cloud. And Snake. Combined. Five minutes later and L-Blocks percentage dropped, but only by less than 2% to 53.04%, its lead on Link now well over 1,000 votes. It would take 20 minutes for L-Block to finally fall below 50% and hours for it to fall below 40%. One hour in and it was 3,500 votes ahead of Link, not quite doubling him. We had all known that Link could fall, we just didnt know it would happen in such a simple, definitive fashion.

The board, naturally, exploded. Flooded by scores of posts from both regulars and the hordes of people that had been rallied to the site from across the Internet, it proved impossible to keep up. Even on the most maximalist settings the front page only contained posts from the last minute or two, a level of activity we had virtually never seen before. The match, the analysis, the board, it was all spinning away from us, the contest climaxing in the most dramatic way possible. As the day went on, we gradually recovered, as did the match itself, with L-Block falling back down to Earth, at least as much as it could after the start it had gotten. Link would never come close to it, losing by over 7,000 votes, only really mustering a comeback during the Morning Vote. The matchs results would end up being the main attraction in and of themselves instead of any dramatic way they played out, and that was for the best I suppose, since those results were dramatic enough. Dramatic, and popular. We routinely saw matches this year get votals of 130-140k votes, but this match would top them all. It would take less than an hour to match the totals of a match from our most recent contest, and when all was said and done, this match would get *195,000* votes, a staggering figure that has never been matched, not even by the megarallies of later years.

To say that people were conflicted about the results would be an understatement. Yes, it was hard not to be bothered by the massive amount of trolls pouring into the site, mocking our contest, and celebrating L-Blocks victory. On the other hand, L-Block was a site creation, a joke that we had all embraced well before the rest of the Internet caught on. It had gotten away from us in the end, but it was also a GameFAQSer at heart. It wasnt an outside invader like Draven or Starcraft or Undertale, regardless of how many fans the latter two games might have had on the site. It was the most hilarious contest run we had ever seen, until all of a sudden it wasnt. While we had loved L-Block all the way to the Finals, once it actually made it there and won, a fear emerged that this was the end of the contests for good. Once you vote for a Tetris piece as your favorite video game character, its hard to for a site to ever take such contests seriously again. This isnt the kind of thing you come back from. But, for a time at least, thats exactly what we did. The only thing more shocking than the fact that it took this long for such a rally to happen was how quickly things went back to normal afterwards. We did go home again, to use a cliche. And so in hindsight, especially post-2013, L-Block was looked back on fondly after all. Was it a portent of things to come, both on GameFAQS and on the Internet writ large? Probably, but we still had some time left. We hadnt quite gotten there yet.

Yeah, the opening 5 minutes of that match are what I remember most. One of the biggest jaw-dropping moments I can recall from any contest.

This match officially ruined the contests. I guess you can argue some of L-Blocks earlier matches did, but this is the one that made us realize the contests were no longer ours.

Yeah they were. Minimal outside involvement didnt matter nearly enough to affect outcomes like this. Perhaps super close matches, and even then it was usually GameFAQs fanbase that was rallying their friends and whatnot.

I don't think that was the end of GameFAQs contests but a glorious one it was, if it was. You can't really be upset by the raw vote totals there. And I think we had a few fun contests after it.

Unlike "rallies" of the future like Undertale and Draven, L-Block really felt like something different. Like... actual people in the wild, like the real world, I encountered talking about it. It FELT like the Internet at large was aware of it and it felt like a big deal. Nothing else since has compared. You had Hayter tweeting about Draggy Crows but it still felt like small time compared to the buzz this one had.

Maybe it's because social media was just starting to really take hold and it felt more novel then, but I really think it just speaks more to its authenticity. I truly think L-Block was a real rally and by and large the ones afterwards were a few people wise to how to surreptitiously mix in cheated votes in a way that made it plausible it was just a rally because it became obvious the site cheating detection measures were really basic stuff.

Id agree this rally was less egregiously offensive compared to the Undertale and Draven ones. I do think it set the precedent though.

I remember being mad at L-Block winning because it wasn't a character. If only I knew what Draven voters would do in 2013...

Every time I see that result I wish there had been a 1v1 final planned for every 4-way contest. Don't get me wrong L-Block would probably have won anyway but Link getting within 7500 votes against essentially the whole internet despite Cloud and Snake holding up is no mean feat.

I enjoyed it at the time. It was a fun change of pace. It was never too overwhelming, as it carefully build up its strength and it didn't feel like it could have happened 1v1 anyway.

Sunroof posted...

I do think it set the precedent though.

There is no correlation. Draven didn't kill 2013 because anyone on the LoL forums had known about L-Block, they voted mindlessly as evidenced by how far ahead Draven were in some matches. Similar for Melee. Undertale was a small post that happens for basically every single match that managed to be shared in right place at the right time at the last second and doesn't even happen if votals are higher at that point.

I get disliking the result, I even get saying it ruined the one contest, but you're giving it way more credit than it deserves here. Rallies were large ever since the very first contest. They prevailed here because of the 4-way format. This contest was also followed by consecutive Link victories with a final of two Zeldas and FFs in between.

There definitely is a correlation. Lblock began the moment where outside influence was the norm, not the exception.

The reason draven and undertale rallies feel "cheap" is because all it took was 1 subcommunity to notice and dominate results. L-Block was pooled from across all parts of the internet. It made internet waves because a lot of different people were involved. For the later, more dominant ones, it was just one subreddit or tumblr page that happened to have easy access to tens of thousands of people.

pjbasis posted...

subreddit or tumblr page that happened to have easy access to tens of thousands of people.

Or a few thousand people and tens of thousands of "rallied" votes

Lopen posted...

Or a few thousand people and tens of thousands of "rallied" votes

hey I don't know about that stuff, but if you're right that only makes things worse

Metal_DK posted...

There definitely is a correlation. Lblock began the moment where outside influence was the norm, not the exception.

No those other times happen regardless. Outside influence was the a norm since 02, which the L-Block victory is closer to in time than the Draven and Undertale victories. The chance of anything winning the contest this way is of course related to site votals at the time but social media also helped.

There were 5 contests between L-Block and Draven, how was it more the norm in those than the ones before 07? I mean I'd still argue the correlation case still falls flat entirely because the later dominant rallies happened with basically no knowledge of L-Block. If the argument is that L-Block is where you lost permanent interest because we had now seen a different winner than GameFAQs would have chosen on their own, then that's not the same thing as it becomming the norm.

I'll stand on that hill till I die

I just think like... People on reddit, people on Tumblr... they're people on the Internet. They're the same people that are everywhere else. If it was drawing legitimate votes, it would feel the same as a Tetris block rally. It's not like people just go to reddit and sit there all day and never interact with any other corner of the internet or... go outside. I know a lot of people who played League of Legends in the real world-- those same people talked about the Tetris Block. They did not talk about Draven once. Perhaps it's a product of it being a different time, but I was always awe struck seeing people I knew and friends of mine talk about a GameFAQs thing with L-Block. They'd literally never brought the site up before or since.

And nothing Sballen presented as evidence there was no cheating showed that he had any sort of analytical mind or drive to actually find exploits in his data. It was just brainless checking against known IP lists or browsers or whatever-- all stuff that can easily be faked.

I mean it's not really his fault. He's clearly not someone who has any IT or programming background. Why the hell would he know anything. I just hated his smug attitude about it.

outside influence has always been around, but it was not the norm. Lblock was the watershed moment.

A twitter page with 10k-15k followers (at the time) that got dozens-to-hundreds of retweets on every contest tweet (so add the followers of every single person who retweeted) and a tumblr page from a GFAQs user (traceexcalibur, same name on tumblr) with hundreds to tens-of-thousands of notes (so add all the followers of everyone who reblogged each post. at least two posts of theirs got over 10k notes) and 4chan as usual (also pushed in several other contests, including heavily for L-Block in 2007) and reddit (definitely happened on r/undertale which had >16k subscribers in November and >32k subscribers on the final day of the contest, doesn't count guests or people not actively subscribed who may stop in to view it, no comment on any other subreddit)

I dunno, it seems easy to see how Undertale steamrolled even before getting into whatever it was that made tumblr particularly vindictive about it. We're talking hundreds of thousands of views minimum for each push, with the largest ones likely reaching millions of views. You only need a small percentage of those views to turn into real votes to wipe out the competition in a contest which got 30-45k votes in non-rallied matches and before the rallies started having spillover.

(Man, remember when 30-45k seemed like bad numbers? Now we have polls that sometimes can't even hit 6k. =\)

Max Payne/Dirk the Daring had the lowest vote totals in contest history for a decade.

Now it might not even be bottom 100.

Views are an extremely misleading statistic though for engagement. You get a view when you just scroll through stuff.

Like I definitely think the number is plausible to be legitimate rallied votes, and that's why I think it fooled bacon enough that his mind that lacks much capacity for critical thinking felt justified in being smug about it. But if you really think about how information travels and stuff, the vote trends for how the rallies played never actually made sense-- it was always like "oh right when this post goes up it spikes and then was a never ending constant stream of votes" but in reality it should have been more of a wave that died off, with sub waves as it got reshared at each point.

It was a HUGE contrast with L-Block's pattern which felt more authentic in terms of Internet and real world footprint. Like I've actually had jobs where I have done analytics on site traffic and engagement with posts and stuff and yeah it's not speaking out of my ass here.

But I don't have the data bacon had so in the end I can't definitively prove or even give strong evidence of anything. It's basically all just eyeball test on how the vote splits came in-- like I went into pretty detailed vote trend analysis in the past and basically no one thought it was conclusive enough even though you could see a clear difference in how the rallies worked compared to other stuff, even smaller scale things from the past. But whatever. Doesn't really matter anyway. It's only cheating if you get caught as they say.

Do you think his methods legitimately caught more Link stuffers than Draven stuffers?

Metal_DK posted...

outside influence has always been around, but it was not the norm. Lblock was the watershed moment.

At worst it felt like it. It was the same next contest as the previous.

pjbasis posted...

Do you think his methods legitimately caught more Link stuffers than Draven stuffers?

His methods probably caught like tens of votes so almost irrelevant.

I do think he probably just bald faced lied though-- I remember he said some absurd thing about some random un rallied entrant being stuffed at 2:1 in some other match and I stopped taking him seriously on that stuff.

Lopen posted...

His methods probably caught like tens of votes so almost irrelevant.

I do think he probably just bald faced lied though-- I remember he said some absurd thing about some random un rallied entrant being stuffed at 2:1 in some other match and I stopped taking him seriously on that stuff.

I feel like this had something to do with Guybrush of all people.

Lopen posted...

I do think he probably just bald faced lied though-- I remember he said some absurd thing about some random un rallied entrant being stuffed at 2:1 in some other match and I stopped taking him seriously on that stuff.

Missingno/Tidus

Also I agree that it was ridiculous to posit that Tidus was stuffing harder than Missingno, especially given what we know about Pokemon from that contest

It just meant they had smarter stuffers.

Best case scenario is like 20 Tidus stuffed votes were caught 10 MissingNo

Worst case is Bacon was just making stuff up to appease people

Lopen posted...

Best case scenario is like 20 Tidus stuffed votes were caught 10 MissingNo

Worst case is Bacon was just making stuff up to appease people

Or just so he doesn't have to change the result most likely

Tidus is one of my favorite characters and I was hoping he pulled that off.

But that comment was hilarious.

Lopen posted...

But if you really think about how information travels and stuff, the vote trends for how the rallies played never actually made sense-- it was always like "oh right when this post goes up it spikes and then was a never ending constant stream of votes" but in reality it should have been more of a wave that died off, with sub waves as it got reshared at each point.

Because of the way Tumblr works, these "sub waves" are going to overlap with one another. The scenario you're positing would require people to basically be doing nothing but stuffing for 24 hours.

Hbthebattle posted...

Because of the way Tumblr works, these "sub waves" are going to overlap with one another. The scenario you're positing would require people to basically be doing nothing but stuffing for 24 hours.

Do you think stuffing is "dude is manually pushing a button over and over"

Stuffing being a consistent flat line is literally what makes sense because they would set up a script to vote automatically. Yes I agree waves overlap and with L-Block you got that behavior too, but it was far far too consistent. It did quite literally feel like Draven/Undertale just got a flat vote number range added every update, with any variance in that and that of other entrants (which was an incredibly low percentage, particularly noticeable in dead of night hours) being probably the meat of the legitimately rallied votes. Also keep in mind the sub waves overlapping is a double edged sword-- any overlap in followers doesn't get double rallied. So yes it'll weaken as time goes.

Honestly the big smoking gun was the run off the other entrants got compared to L-Block. People used "oh its a rally from specific places not random areas of the Internet like L-Block so of course the conversion rate is higher" but that just feels like a cop out from people who think stuffing is pushing a button.

Prologue - July 25th, 2005 - 11:39 AM PST: During the otherwise uneventful Ganondorf/Yuna match, a post was made in the Stats and Discussion Topic. User Team Rocket Elite had noticed something odd in the match results that were currently playing out. Yuna had gotten a large surge of votes in the 11:00-11:15 AM segment of the match, hundreds of votes more than she should have gotten based on the total amount of votes coming in. Very unusual. Then, exactly one hour later on the dot, the same thing happened. And then one hour after that, it happened yet again. For three hours in a row, at roughly the same time every hour, Yuna would receive a surge of several hundred extra votes. It appeared as if a stuffer was afoot, although why they were bothering to do such a thing in a match that Ganondorf was winning easily was anyones guess. And then, after the third incidence, just as suddenly as the stuffer began, they stopped, and the rest of the match played out without any other suspicious activity. No one quite knew what to make of what had just happened, and some even insisted that what we were seeing was just random variance, unlikely but entirely statistically sound. (Note: Remember this argument for later) But there was of course, the other, more obvious explanation. Someone was seeing if they could stuff votes without getting caught. Someone, it seemed, was practicing. But practicing for what?

11. Kefka vs. Tommy Vercetti (2005) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e5e46309.jpg

Kefka 48.86% 47920
Tommy Vercetti 51.14% 50165
TOTAL VOTES 98085
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(3)Kefka_vs_(6)Tommy_Vercetti_2005
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2084-flood-division-round-1-kefka-vs-tommy-vercetti

Kefka Vs. Vercetti seemed to be a no brainer at first. Vercetti was a notch or two above Kefka in the 2004 X-Stats, even taking into account Kefkas surprisingly strong showing that year, and so, by 2005s logic there was no reason not to pick him. As the match grew closer and closer however, the prediction market started to tighten up. The board loves damning the torpedoes and going full steam ahead when theres any borderline debatable match involving a board favorite, and Kefka was certainly a board favorite. Kefkas matches make no damn sense had not yet become a meme, but he had shown enough variability in the two years since his contest debut that anyone predicting anything in any direction about him was able to find something to hold onto. And then once the match picture got released what had initially seemed like a long shot suddenly looked like a real shot. Lettuce Kefka, for the moment at least, was no more, and with a much more recognizable close up picture, the chances of Kefka pulling off the upset were looking more and more possible. He still faced a two to one deficit in the Oracle Challenge, but things had tightened up in the boards mind, and thats exactly where Kefka needed them to be.

Kefkas matches are always good for a surprise or three, and the opening of this match was no exception. We all knew how beloved Kefka was on the Board, but the Board Vote he got here was truly impressive, taking just over an hour for Kefka to even drop below 55%. While his percentage would drop from there, Kefkas lead would steadily increase all throughout the First Night Vote, and it looked at first like the Kefka supporters would be getting the last laugh on the Statsheads after all. Kefka was up by hundreds of votes all throughout the polls initial hours, and he would keep increasing all the way until 8:00 AM EST, the point at which the Day Vote would finally kick in. But even if it did kick in in Vercettis favor, Kefkas lead had already broken the 1,000 vote mark, and the GTA antihero was looking to have an uphill climp ahead. While Kefka might have been known to have a dismal Day Vote, GTAs track record wasnt much better, and it remained an open question as to how much Vercetti would be able to swing things, and how rapidly he could do it.

Two things became clear once the Morning Vote kicked in: Vercetti was going to be the one winning the Day, but it was not going to be an easy affair. This was not going to be the kind of comeback that was pulled off in an hour or two; this was going to take the entire day. Vercetti would have to take things back vote by vote, minute by minute as the day went on, and we could tell that we were in for a slog of a battle whose tension wasnt about to die down anytime soon. By 8 AM, Vercetti had started stalling, and around 9 AM, his comeback started for good, and for the first two hours, it all seemed to be going well, if not especially quickly. But then, as midday approached, and Vercetti brought Kefkas lead below 800 votes, he would run into a problem. The Barriers had arrived. Just as it was getting started, Vercettis comeback had come to a sudden halt. For the next hour and a half, Kefka would receive a surge of votes that would not only stall the match out, but allow his lead to start creeping back up towards 900 votes again. Eventually, this rush of votes faded away (or was just overwhelmed by the rest of the Day Vote), and Vercetti got back to work on his comeback. Unfortunately for him however, this proved to not be an isolated incident. All throughout the rest of the afternoon and early evening, at various points throughout the comeback, Kefkas numbers would radically improve and he would be able to limit Vercetti to a stall for 30-45 minutes. Then, just as suddenly as the stall started, it would stop, and Vercetti would get back to work tearing off votes at a steady clip. As the day went on these stalls got more frequent, sometimes occurring every time the lead dropped by a hundred votes. Vercetti was trying his best to finish the job, but there was clearly something more powerful going on behind the scenes to prevent him from getting there.

In case anyone is unaware, the comeback described above is not how vote trends generally work, and was seen from the very beginning as the work of a vote stuffer. But to a board desperate for a Kefka win, many didnt care, celebrating Kefkas Barriers whenever they arrived, almost like clockwork, every time. The stop and start nature of the comeback seemed to create a feverish energy in the board the likes of which wed hardly ever seen before, and everyone sat hanging on every single movement of the poll, refreshing and refreshing every chance they got. The Stats and Discussion Topic would become the defacto Update Topic for the match, and we would end up going through 6 Stats Topics in a single day, a record which I believe still stands. Aside from the closeness of the match, the tension was also ratcheted up by the obviousness of the cheating, with many people clamoring for CJay to intervene or make a statement. There was also however, a contingent who insisted up until the end that what we were seeing was not proof of anything suspicious. Comebacks werent perfect they claimed, and Kefkas numbers were statistically sound. I dont know how many lessons that Ive learned from our Contests which Ive ended up taking over with me into the real world, but the most enduring one might be to never just trust something just because of statistics, a lesson I learned thanks to this match.

In any case, despite all efforts to the contrary, by evening, Vercetti had finally, just barely, moved into the lead. And then, after another stallfest between himself and Kefka, the Second Night Vote kicked in, and Kefka started to rebuild his lead all over again. Cheating or not, it now looked as if the Barriers had worked. And then, shortly after midnight EST, with only hours left to go in the match, Ceej would come down from on high and confirm what we had assumed all match. Yes, someone had been stuffing for Kefka, a user named George Romero, and a shocking 1,800 votes would be removed from Kefkas total, putting Vercetti safely in the lead. Also, real-time results for matches would be ended for good, and going forward polls would update in five minute increments, a change which has stuck to this day. A match that had taken all day to play out was now over in a matter of seconds. A cheater had been unmasked, but at least they had given us one hell of a ride, and cemented both Kefka and Vercettis places in contest history.

As a postscript, George Romero would provide a tell-all over AIM where he claimed to also be responsible for almost every controversial match in contest history, stuffing for Samus over Sonic, Mario over Cloud and Crono twice (but stuffing for Crono in his victory over Mario.) As a nice touch, he even claimed to have been stuffing against Starcraft, but that an even more powerful force was pushing back against him. Who knows if any of this was true, but it only added to the mystique of this match.

BARRIERS

Truly a legendary match despite its lack of long-term ramifications.

And I don't believe any of George Romero's "confession," of course. Just a guy trying to make the most of his 15 minutes of fame.

Awesome memorable match that is a critical part of the foundation of why I loved these contests. Probably about where I'd rank it.

I went to bed when Kefka was still ahead and was shocked and disappointed when I woke up to find that I didnt get my point.

On the flip side, I had Mario beating Crono in 2003 and went to bed while Crono was ahead so you win some you lose some.

If my count is correct

Summer 2002 - 2
Summer 2003 - 3
Spring 2004 - 2
Summer 2004 - 1
Summer 2007 - 1
Summer 2013 - 1

We were given the top 25, but most regulars should be able to guess most matches remaining just from this.

Off the top of my head

Mario/Cloud 2002
Mario/Crono 2002
Mario/Crono 2003
Link/Cloud 2003
Frog/Chief 2004
Link/Draven (/Shepard) 2013

I'm kind of sad that I was traveling on summer vacation and I missed Kefka vs. Vercetti as a result (since this was the time before WIFI and smart phones, or even wired internet being a common perk for hotels).

Yeah, those are obvious.

It's also obvious what is one entry in one of the Spring 2004 and the Summer 2007 contests.

Edit: read one of the 02 wrong: I'd say if two matches from that year it has to be the two.

Mario/Crono 2002 has already been done. Pretty sure the other one is Sonic/Samus.

I would guess the Games Contest 2004 ones are both Starcraft matches (Halo and Wind Waker haven't been done yet, if I recall, but maybe they have).

Trying to remember what hasn't been done from 2007.

There's also apparently a third from 2003... I could always go back and check the log site but it's more fun trying to remember ourselves... did Luigi/Squall come up yet?

A couple more Kefka/Vercetti facts:

Vercetti was the favorite on Board 8, but Kefka was a clear favorite among brackets in general. Only around 37-38% got it right, assuming no faulty memory. But there was an even more interesting stat: Perfect brackets in general heavily favored Kefka. Less than 17% of the still-perfect brackets picked Vercetti vs. Kefka (again, going off of my memory)!