Play 4 Japan Recap
Jun 04, 11:00 am

Today I wanted to tell you about my event of the Play for Japan charity marathon that happened on May 20 - 22nd. I know I said I was going to do a video about this event but my laptop officially crapped out on me sadly, so a written one will have to do for now :(. If you missed out, I’ll tell ya what took place. A couple of weeks ago I took a trip to L.A. at the Machinima Studios to do a charity event to raise money for the American Red Cross for Japan by playing Call of Duty Black Ops for 50 hours. We ended up raising over 22k during the course of the event. It was Josh Olin (Community Manager of Treyarch) and I that decided to do this crazy but noble thing. We started playing Call of Duty Black Ops on Friday May 20 at 12pm exactly and ended the marathon on Sunday May 22nd at 2pm. But that isn’t all we were trying to accomplish during this marathon, we wanted to also attempt to break a world record of the longest time played on a first person shooter. The record was at 38+ hours but we wanted to shatter it by doing 50 hours. We are still waiting to get approval for this record but we have high hopes. So I’m here to tell you some of the rules and equipment that we used during the marathon.

Equipment
Besides the camcorders and laptops for the live streaming, I’ll tell you what I used during the marathon that helped me through it all.
Gunnars - My Gunnar glasses was extremely important since their glasses keep your eyes from straining, which was helpful since we were using 27in monitors for the whole time of gameplay. Since I have horrible eyesight, usually staring at a small monitor gives me migraines but I didn’t have to take any headache medicine the entire time. You can now purchase those at Best Buy.
Astro A-30 Headset - I definitely love my A-30s! My ears didn’t hurt at all from wearing them for so long, plus for those with longer hair A-30s are amazing because your hair doesn’t ever get caught in them and being able to customize your speaker tags is a definite perk (I have my two favorite games of 2010 for my speaker tags, Assassins Creed and Black Ops).
Kontol Freek Using Kontrol Freek I’ve noticed my accuracy getting better. I only use one of them even though they do come in pairs. I think it was mainly because I lost my other one, but no matter they work. Not only that, using the one Kontrol Freek, my right thumb didn’t hurt by the end of the event, but my left one without the Kontol Freek did. Maybe I should use both from now on

The Rules


The rules of the whole marathon were very complex, but luckily applying for the world record we were sent a packet of documents which told us what we needed to do to make this a legitimate world record. So I decided to write out some of the rules that were given but if you want everything in detail you’ll have to apply for yourself.

1. Every hour that we played during the marathon we had to have a picture taken of us playing Call of Duty Black Ops. Example: We started playing at 12pm on Friday, so at the top of each hour we played a photo was taken of us. But you have to make sure you have the time of which the picture is taken in the photo itself.

2. During the marathon we were allowed to have breaks. Each hour of playing Call of Duty Black Ops we were given 10 minutes of break time that we could use at any point. We could either use the 10 minutes after that hour for a break or we could bank the 10 minutes and keep adding to the time each hour we play. We ended up playing for 8 hours until we took a half hour break and ended up having 50 extra minutes we used later. The thing is, you CANNOT add on the time to your marathon if you choose to not take a break toward the end. So say you have 20 minutes left of your break time at the end of your marathon and you stop at 40 hours. You can’t add the 20 minutes of your break time to your final time.

3. Every few hours you had to have a new witness watching you play your game of choice and sign a document that was given by the World Record Website . Luckily for us we had the staff at the Machinima Studio make a schedule and had them be hosts during their shifts, which helped immensely with keeping us awake.

Prizes
Through out the marathon we gave out prizes to those that donated and recruited people to the charity. Randomly we picked out winners for the prizes seen below. But that wasn’t all that we ended up doing. For the person that donated the most by the end of the marathon got a console of their choosing (signed by Machinima Staff, Josh and I), t-shirt, hat and poster. The winner ended up being Steven Yakto with the donation of $5,423,00. Thank You Steven! You rocked!
That wasn’t the only way to win, another grand prize which consisted of an autographed RC-XD, Call of Duty t-shirt, hat, poster and Xbox live arcade codes. The way to win that swag bag was to recruit as many friends as you can to the cause. The winner of that category was me with 544 members, which would’ve been great but respectfully I let the next person get the prize. The winner was Conor Smart with 33 recruits. Thank you Conor

If you would like to donate or even check out where you can support the cause here’s the link play4japan
As for the rest that donated, recruited and played online with us (Guttermagic, vG Peac3keeper, Chickamungus, Bootystar FDC and other cadettes that joined on and off). To the fellow Dolls for helping me and supporting this event. I love you girls. To Machinima that let us have this event there at their studio, helped set up this charity event and just were freakin awesome. Last but not least to Josh Olin for being my partner in crime on doing this event, we kept each other going and made it through in flying colors. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, I really appreciate the support in every way. You kept us going through the tough times of the marathon. Thank You so very much

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