We survived the first and SMASHED through our initial fundraising goal to earn just shy of $7000 by days end!
Without a doubt, we could not have achieved these goals in just three short weeks without the incredible support of our friends, family and you, our unfailing community.
October 25 dawned early (for a weekend), and saw most of the "morning crew" in by 9 am. With some minor technical issues since this was our first time steaming in the office, we started our morning with a rousing game of Cards Against Humanity. We ran through our schedule of games/events over the next 25 hours and wrapped up on Sunday at 10 am - thanks Daylight Savings for adding an additional hour! Extra Life is incredible in its ability to bring together seemingly unconnected communities; we had people participate through donations, encouragement via our various game chats and Twitch stream, and dropping by our office. We even got a special delivery of Alexander Keith's all the way from Halifax - Thanks JPL! ;)
Our marathon's caffine count:
Our efforts have placed us within the top fundraisers for BC Children's Hospital for this year, and ViATEC named us Tectorian(s) of the Week!
For interested Bush Whacker players: You can still donate if you're interested and be immortalized in our next area expansion. This option remains open until the end of the 2014 calendar, when the 2014 Extra Life drive closes. For any players who donated on other CNE member's profiles: Justin will honour your donation as well, so please comment on Justin's page with how you'd like your character to appear. Thank you for supporting all of us!!
Our CEO, Eric Jordan shared these thoughts:
Not only was this a great experience for us as a company (and for me personally), but we learned a lot and have a bunch of ideas for how we can do even better next year!
Some of my personal highlights:
- Having both of my sons in attendance for much of the event; my youngest even managed to stay up most of the night! Not only was this a bonding experience for us, but it was great way to introduce them to helping charities (especially a children's hospital).
- Dancing to "Mickey" on the live stream - Shards of Titan has a funny reference to the 80s song "Mickey." Our players wanted to watch us dance and so we said that we would if our team donations went over $6K. The players got together and we very quickly exceeded $6K.
- Connecting so many different communities together for a great cause - It was a tremendously rewarding experience that I honestly have some trouble putting into words.
- Games, games and more games - Playing so many games was great, even if my abilities dropped dramatically as I got more and more tired. As a side note, I found it very cruel to play a game called The Long Dark and to see my character get to sleep in the game, but I needed to stay awake in real life. At least when I played our new game, Shards of Titan, I didn't have to watch my character sleep. Evidently, characters in our game never get sleepy.
Thank you so much everyone for supporting us. With all the fun we were having it could have been easy to forget that it was all for the kids, but your generous donations kept us on track and helped as far surpass our original fundraising goal! Thank you!