Multiplayer Mode

Joining the international fundraising efforts of Extra Life for the first time, Circle of Hope Marlton & Crescent hosted a Sponsor-a-Nerd 24-hour gaming marathon on November 2. Twenty-one gamers registered online as part of the Circle of Hope team and then raised money for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (and a couple of other children’s hospitals) by finding donations through sponsors, just like their more athletic counterparts might do for a charity run.

On the day of the event, participants started arriving at MC at 8am where we had repurposed the space into a gaming haven. We brought in extra couches, hooked projectors up to gaming consoles, set up several tables for board games, and created an area for the computer gamers. The variety of games stretched from bestselling titles to bins of obscure tabletop games to stacks of NES cartridges that still smelled like the 80s. People were free to play whatever they wanted at any given moment, but we also held tournaments for which participants competed for donated prizes and tried to unlock achievements. If you would have walked in Saturday night, you would have seen a room of forty to fifty people variously watching the Power Rangers Movie projected onto a wall, battling it out in Super Smash Brothers, demoing the Occulus Rift, facing off in Magic the Gathering, concluding a five-hour Settlers of Cataan tournament, or trying to destroy one others’ towers in the PC game Tower Wars. And many of these gamers were playing with/against people they had never met before.

By the time we emerged with blurry eyes at 8am the next day—actually 25 hours later thanks to Daylight Savings Time—there were only about ten of us still standing. The more important number, though, was the $2,330 our team ended up raising to help kids at CHoP receive treatment regardless of their family’s ability to pay. And remember, we weren’t doing this alone. Through the collective efforts of other gamers in the region, CHoP raised over $71,000. And as if that number isn’t mind blowing enough, over $3.8 million dollars was raised for various children’s hospitals throughout the world as a result of the Extra Life event in a simple reminder that what we can do alone pales in comparison to what we can do together. Reporting: Randy Ribay