I know this took longer than I wanted it to, but I finally got around to wrapping up my thoughts on my charity marathon for Sightsavers. SGDQ happened a week later, and I never really got time to sit down and really process and absorb what happened until now.

When I first beat Ocarina of Time blindfolded in 2013, I said during the end credits that I wanted to one day do a marathon stream where I beat the game from start to finish. A lot has changed in my life since that time, but this was always something that was in the back of my mind and something I wanted to do. I had completed a 100% challenge of the game and also done my blindfolded child dungeons run for AGDQ in 2015, but still hadn’t put forth much effort into this marathon. I gave a half hearted attempt in the summer of 2016 by trying to reach out to a charity, but finally decided to get serious and do it this past summer.

The first thing I tired to do was research charities that helped blind people in some way. Research to end blindness, helping train guide dogs, or helping fund surgeries to prevent blindness were all at the top of my list. To me, something like this was crucial for the marathon. I wanted that strong link between what I was doing in the game and what I was fighting for. It was also important for me to not just have a link to a donation page on my stream, I wanted the interaction where donations and comments could pop up on stream. Since I was blindfolded the entire time, this was really the only way I could interact with the donators. So these were the main points I wanted for my marathon. In order to do this, the easiest method was to get a paypal address from a charity and then simply place it in my streamlabs account instead of my own paypal.

I was in talks with a charity months before summer, and I also decided to contact Sinister1 about getting on the front page of twitch for the event. He is the bridge between Twitch and speedrunners, and although my marathon wasn’t a pure type of speedrun, I was trying to beat the game as quickly as I could. Plus he has done Punchout blindfolded as well so I feel like he understood where I was coming from. He was extremely helpful in the whole process, picking the dates that had the least conflicts and giving me a lot of useful information. We had a short discussion to go over time estimates, taking breaks, staying hydrated, etc. I was never really too concerned with these things since I’ve trained for and completed actual marathons and love endurance events to begin with…sitting around in a chair moving my thumbs feels like nothing compared to running for hours. But he had some good advice and I wanted to stick to it.

We decided to say the event would be about 24 hours which I thought was reasonable. Before going into the time estimate here too much, I wanted to step back and go over my different blindfolded challenges. There are the ones like the 2013 any% and 2015 100% Ocarina of Time challenges. For these, I did them every Wednesday, with no real time constraints. If a room took 2 hours, it took 2 hours. I had no expectation of time, and I didn’t even use a timer. I didn’t even use glitches or setups. These were truly exploration challenges. For 95% of the rooms, I didn’t even study them beforehand. These were pretty stress free for me and I was pretty casual with them. In contrast, my child dungeons run at AGDQ 2015 had a VERY strict time limit. Sure, I may have been able to go over the 1 hour 30 minute estimate by a little, but getting stuck in a room for an hour would have been a DIASTER. This run also needed to do quite a few difficult tricks. Therefore, all tricks, glitches, and rooms had predetermined moves and setups to ensure success quickly. This type of run is MUCH more stressful. If you forget one part of your setup, you’re in bad shape. If the setup doesn’t produce a result the way you were expecting, you’re in bad shape. I stressed the entire week at AGDQ that year, I flaked on everyone, I honestly didn’t have a lot of fun that year. I spent most of my waking hours practicing my setups. Even still, for that run, there were a few near catstrophies (Deku 2-3-1 and entering Jabu were both quite bad). Fortunately it all worked out in the end.

For this event, I would obviously prefer more of the exploration, freelancing around the rooms type of setting than one with strict times and strict movement. But it still has to be done fast and I have to be able to finish the game. So I wanted a sort of hybrid of the two…where it felt like I was figuring things out as I went but really I had most of what I wanted set up well to begin with. I think for the most part I accomplished this and am pretty happy with the flow of the marathon.

Anyway, with that set up I focused back to the charity. Things kind of went downhill, with a bit over a month to the marathon I realized I wasn’t likely to get the paypal address from my charity of choice. This put me into a different mode, one I should have done from the start. I decided to ‘shotgun’ search a ton of charities and get in contact with a ton of them, not just focus on one. I checked a ton of charities on Charity Navigator and sent an email out to probably 15-20 different charities that helped blind people in some way. Over half ignored my request, some responded once and never got back, a few seemed interested but didn’t want to give out a paypal address. I get it in some sense, here I am just a random guy asking for a charity to give out their paypal email to stream a video game for 24 hours. Some of them probably have no idea what streaming or twitch is…even though I linked to my channel and my previous AGDQ run showing that I had experience doing this type of thing. Things were getting desperate with only a few weeks to go when Sightsavers came through! My point of contact was a gamer himself and had even heard of streaming! I was able to get the paypal info and set up my streamlabs so money could go directly to the charity. This was HUGE for me as I did not want to deal with collecting it myself and then donating it later. We went through a few back and forth emails about branding, logos, etc. and everything was good to go! They even wrote an article to hype up my event which was awesome! I really am thrilled Sightsavers came through and I wanted to really reward them for taking a chance on me. The goal I set was $10,000 which I thought we had a decent chance of hitting.

…But setting all this up with the charity took some time, and I was behind on practicing. I had done all of the first child section with no practice in about 8 hours, which seemed fine to me. With a week to go I had only done the 3 child dungeons again, and worked my way through forest and parts of fire. I was starting to get really stressed. I took a ton of time to set up streamlabs and alerts and stuff, since I had never had these on my stream before. Amalthes did a stream layout for me and I didn’t have time to fully implement it. I also got prizes and had a site with pillowcases for purchase. All of this took time away from practice. I slept horribly Wednesday night. Practice in Fire Temple went kinda bad on Thursday. I slept horribly again. So with only a day left, I was now in panic mode. I took a half day on Friday from work…got home just after lunch and practiced until midnight. I went through Water Temple, Shadow Temple, Spirit Temple, for about 8 hours that day. The event started at 9am the next morning. I couldn’t sleep well that night either. Got up around 6am and practiced some more. Got through trials and the escape and refreshed on a few temples and that was all I could do. It would only take getting stuck a few places to completely sink my event so I was extremely nervous as we went live.

Since this was for charity, I wanted to keep the stream family friendly and reduce my swearing so I had a swear jar for $1 every time – to be donated to the charity. It took a little while for me to adjust. In the first hour I swore 4 times (later a viewer went back and found another 4 I had missed so it was 8 total) but after that I was able to turn this off quite well, I didn’t swear again the entire time. Everything up through Deku Tree and Zelda went fine, which helped calm my nerves a bit. I had a few hiccups in Dodongo’s Cavern though with an issue using the Hylian Shield (Shield flicking with it doesn’t work the same way as Deku Shield to ‘reset’ to a neutral roll). It amazes me still that a little detail like this can throw a huge wrench into what I’m doing blindfolded. That is all it takes sometimes, I probably lost a good 15 or 20 minutes falling on the upper bridge in DC so I was a bit behind here. I made it up almost right after with an incredible silver scale diving mini game. This is the worst RNG of the whole thing, because the rupees locations are random and water is a pain to navigate blindfolded. So my strategy is just go through a sweeping pattern and hope I hit them all. I thought this would take 1-3 hours alone…anything around 1 hour I’d be thrilled, anything around 2 was average, if it was over 3 it would have been bad luck. I think it only took 30 minutes or so. We ran into our first technical hiccup though, my capture card froze! Imagine doing a charity event blindfolded and then just hearing all the sound cut out. It’s pretty terrifying, you have no idea what just went wrong. I took off the blindfolded and turned my monitors back on. Stream was up so that was good, but the game seemed frozen so I just shut it off and turned it back on…oops! The game itself was fine. I figured the best solution was to just go back to the place I had been and then put the blindfold back on.

Continuing on, Jabu went pretty smoothly and as I went into the adult section I was feeling pretty good. We were less than 8 hours in and had already raised several thousand dollars! Another tough spot can be the hookshot but I quickly got past this section and headed to forest. The moblins gave me some trouble but most of Forest Temple was great. I had a few super clutch moments in Forest. In the very back there is an ice eye and rotating platforms. Normally the blindfolded strategy is just shoot the eye and die, because that preserves the eye switch (Farore’s Wind warp point or a save and quit do NOT). Before dying I figured I’d at least *try* and get through the rotating platforms once and then if I fell just die and go through the temple as planned. I managed to pull it off!!!

Of course, right after that I accidentally used Din’s Fire instead of Farore’s Wind leaving me with not enough magic for a safe warp point. This put at least an hour of progress in jeopardy without a savepoint but I clutched out possibly my favorite room in the whole game to do blindfolded and that’s Amy’s (the green poe) block puzzle. I pushed the blocks together and had to hope they would turn into place. A perfectly timed donation happened which was hilarious. My donation alerts were the sounds of the ‘puzzle solved’ noise, and JUST as the rotation happened someone timed a donation making me think I solved the puzzle. Great moment!

I finished the rest of Forest without too much going wrong, except my capture card was definitely acting up multiple times now. Thankfully I had a backup, and chat was very quick to get me the instructions to set it up and get going again (Thanks Jha!). We didn’t have any other tech issues from that point out. I took a break to eat dinner here for about 30 minutes.

My parents know I’ve been streaming for years but don’t really understand the whole culture of it much. Still, when I told them I was doing this event they said if there was anything they could do to help and be supportive. In the end they seemed eager to help make me some food since I wouldn’t really have time to prepare anything myself. They drove 2 hours to my apartment from where they live to make a pizza in the evening, and I only stayed and spent 30 minutes with them. Then they turned around and drove 2 hours back. They also donated twice (after I helped show my mom how to do it on the phone haha) during the event. Thank you so much for your support, Mom and Dad!

Fire Temple went very well as I continued into the late evening. It’s a long temple but I was patient and my strategies paid off. There is one tough room here as well, getting the hammer on the timed fire circle around the chest. I once again seemed to clutch every big moment, and got it on the second try! By the end of Fire we had raised another several thousand dollars and I felt quite good going into the night that I’d finish around 24 hours. Ice cavern was next and it was pretty challenging. It was the first time I got to a spot where I just completely forgot my strategy. I knew I had a way of jumping on a few platforms but just couldn’t pull it off. What’s worse is, the room is all the way in the back and there are no checkpoints with doors like in other temples to set an FW warp point. Finally I managed to get the blue fire and then I took another break in the gameplay to do something very special.

I had gotten into playing OoT blindfolded after talking with genuinescorruption in late 2007, a person who has been blind from birth. He wanted to beat OoT and wanted some help in the form of instructions through areas of the game. After an on and off effort, he was able to beat the game in November of 2009. We don’t talk everyday, but still keep in touch from time to time. I asked if he wanted to be a part of my event and if he would want to sit down and chat for an hour or so, and he was eager to do so. I gave him a list of some talking points and questions to generate some discussion, and we got all the technical stuff out of the way (always an adventure when trying to coordinate through certain software with someone who is blind). So at this point in the ice cavern, I called him up and we talked. I was a little nervous for how this would go…I know it’s not gameplay and people might get bored, but it was important to me to include this in my event. I was absolutely THRILLED with how it turned out. Genuinescorruption is a gamer, just like anyone else on Twitch, and you can tell just by the interview that this is the case. You can tell how much knowledge and passion he has for Ocarina of Time. I am so happy with how this came through in the discussion, because I’ve known it for years and years. In addition, we talked about the types of things he has to deal with on a day to day basis, things a lot of us take for granted. When he talked about starting a new job/internship and just needing to learn where to go to use the bathroom it really hit me just how difficult that would be. I strongly encourage you if you have an hour to listen to the discussion…it truly was one of the high points of the whole event for me!

After saying goodbye and getting back to the game, I completed ice cavern and we were about half way through the event, and had raised a bit over $4000. Donations had slowed a little but I thought the pace was still good to get to the 10K and I liked where I was at in the game still. The Water Temple actually went very well…but it takes its toll. It’s long, requires many rooms, requires many saves, requires many inventory switches for iron boots, etc. My approach was very meticulous and methodical, and I was happy with how it went. But even still, it took over 2 hours and was very mentally draining. Plus, we were now getting into the early AM hours and my mind was starting to fatigue. There were a few times in Water where I could sense my focus slipping, my mental picture of the game wasn’t as sharp.

Moving on to Shadow Temple, I was able to skip the Bottom of the Well since the reward there is the Lens of Truth, which does me no good in a blindfolded challenge. Origionally I was going to get it just for completion, but decided I’d rather save the time and just do Wasteland without it (the only part where it is useful since I can target the poe). The first part of Shadow was fine, but then I had really the worst section of the marathon. I had an amazing strategy to get over this one skinny section in the lower part of Shadow. In my practice it went well, but I could not remember how to do it properly. The worst thing was, it was SO amazing, I felt committed to trying to pull it off, and so I spent a lot of time just trying to get it right. Once that failed, I had to do one of the hardest things in blindfolded playthrough, and that is ‘map out’ an area with the hookshot. It’s not so bad to move around and map things with your sword and movement, but skinny platforms and ledges are VERY difficult as you must hookshot ‘sonar’ your way through them. This room alone took over 2 hours, took us through the early AM hours, and basically killed any chance at a sub 24 hour finish. I needed an extra break here, and finally just shifted my strategy to something different before getting it. Donations slowed down and it was tough to keep going…my mind was feeling the fatigue.

But I continued on, through Gerudo guards and Spirit Temple, which went pretty well. At this point I was getting a bit of a second wind, the sun was definitely up and my body started to give up on trying to sleep and prepare for the next day instead. Everything in Spirit was fine but there was a few great moments where I didn’t think I solved a puzzle with the light when I actually did, causing me to do it over several times, as well as not realizing Twinrova had knocked me off the platform and thinking I was still up there. At this point I was almost 24 hours in already, and had ‘only’ raised $6500. I started to prepare for the end, figuring trials would take some time and I was already thinking about things to say to the chat about coming up short of the $10K goal, “Well it’s still $7500 for the charity, great work guys!”

I was very out of it for a lot of the trials mentally. I didn’t remember my strategies to get to the doors even, which should not have been that hard. I don’t think any of them went particularly bad, but once again the worst part of this section was going out for double defense, and then coming back in. I wanted double defense for the final battle for sure, but relocating the rainbow bridge was painful. Still, with all of this I managed to get to ganondorf and defeat him in about 27 hours and we had raised over $7000 at this point.

But there was still the escape. Another timed event. This one is interesting though as every time you fail it, your hearts are restocked. So there is never fear of dying, but you must continue to start over from the top. I had strategies I liked for most sections, but putting it all together was so difficult. What’s worse, every time you get hit by a rock and get thrown off early on, you basically know your whole 3 minute timed section is useless, and you have to just let it run out and start over. Donations started to pour in though. Everyone was sensing the end was close. We jumped from $7500 to $8000. To $9000. The alerts were driving me mad, I almost wanted to say, “Hey guys, I’m trying to get this collapse here and I’m really struggling, can you back off a bit?” but I didn’t want to stop the hype and all the donations for the charity. It climbed all the way to the $10K all in a matter of what felt like only 10 minutes. It was fantastic, I couldn’t believe it! I felt so determined to not quit and to give everyone a great finish to the event.

At this point though, I was really struggling mentally. It started back in the Water Temple, but now it was worse. 10 times worse. My mind was just so zoned out and so unfocused, it was almost like I was on some kind of drug. Usually when I play blindfolded and I’m sharp, I try and keep a very fluent mental picture of where Link is, what the camera is doing, how he’s moving about in the room, what walls and geometry look like in that room, etc. Basically, I try and play as though the TV is on, and the TV screen is my mental image. In the Water Temple there were times where this kinda…went off track. The ‘camera’ in my mind of the gameplay would just kinda zoom out a bit. Hard to explain. It got worse in Shadow, but Spirit was ok as I got a second wind in the morning. But now in the collapse, I was so fatigued and so drained, my mental image was doing all sorts of weird things. The camera would take off to the sky, spinning around and rotating above Link. Link himself would just go really fast or really slow, even though I could hear his footsteps it wasn’t really lining up with my ‘mental image’ of him. The edges of my mental picture were distorted, warping and twisting. I wasn’t controlling any of this, it just felt like my brain was free to create any image it wanted. The only thing keeping it together was the last bits of focus I had, and my muscle memory of the rooms. Fortunately, my muscle memory seemed to pull through, and even if the image in my head wasn’t right or didn’t make sense, my hands kept doing the correct inputs.

I was getting closer. The stalfos fight was really killing a lot of attempts because it’s hard to do that battle fast. Several times I got to the final area before the exit but ran out of time. I was sensing it was close and then…devastation. I got to the very end, the timer ticking down the final 10 seconds. Zelda coming up the stairs, me pleading for her to open the door. With 1 second left on the timer I rolled the wrong way, and the timer ran out. To be so close and get sent back to the top again was crushing. I felt like the next half hour to an hour of attempts went poorly. It sucked a lot of the remaining energy I had and my mind shifted from thoughts of “Getting closer…any time now!” to “Am I ever gonna get this?” Finally after over another hour I had an awesome stalfos battle and knew right away I was going to crush it. I think I had over 30 seconds left at the end and got through. The collapse probably was around 3 hours and was so mentally taxing, but I had one more battle left…

Ganon is rather terrifying in a blindfolded run. Even with double defense and 2 fairies, a death is devastating. It would again put you up to the top of the tower at collapse. Meaning the thing I spent the last 3 hours doing I’d have to do again. And next time, the fairies would be gone for Ganon, so it is critical that he be killed on the first try. I actually turned my alert noises off for the final battle, because I wanted to muster up the last bit of focus I had for this important battle. The first phase isn’t really a problem, using deku nuts means you have a large hitbox and Ganon is slow. The second phase is much harder as you have to use the Master Sword. I was doing alright but lost my first fairy. Got a few more hits in but then I was hit a few more times and my hearts were already at critical health. My fear started creeping up at this point as I hadn’t got a ton of hits yet in the second phase. Instead of using a fairy, I first used Nayru’s Love which uses a lot of magic but protects you from attacks. I think this was a good move as it preserved my last fairy but gave a long time to relax a bit and get a few hits in. Finally I finished the battle and got him down! I had to put the blindfold back on for the final hit which I messed up for a bit but then it was all over! After over 30 hours of playing and over $10K raised, I was about as exhausted as I could ever imagine. The ending was so emotional and I was nearly in tears over everyone’s support. I’m really glad I got to finish the whole thing and close it out on a high note.

I actually didn’t immediately go to bed, I went outside for a short walk to try and soak in what we all accomplished. My brain was completely fried though and I thought I should go back inside and get some sleep before I stupidly wander out into traffic or something. I slept for about 13 hours and my alarm went off for work the next morning it felt like I could have slept for another 3 or so hours easily. I got through the day and then did the review stream watching back some of the better moments and sharing some laughs with everyone in chat. I also drew the prizes for donators and had a lot of fun doing that too. Finally, I added up my subs/bits/ad revenue for the month and contributed a little over $700 myself, to bring the final total to $12,346.67!! It took me a few weeks to ship out the prizes. This cost me more than I thought it would totalling around $300, not to mention the prizes themselves were around $500. So I set myself back a bit more than I thought this event would cost me, but I didn’t want to exclude anyone outside the US from the prizes so it was worth it.

I feel like overall the event was a huge success, I am so happy with how it all went. But I was also very relieved to be done because it was quite stressful for me as well. I’m not sure if I’d do something else like this in the future. It requires a tremendous amount of focus. It’s hard to plug the charity and be interactive when you are blindfolded. Any time I would just start talking a bit about something I’d have to stop myself and refocus on the game. I could see doing more charity work in the future or other 24 hour streams, but I don’t know if I’d want to add a blindfolded element again in this way.

I want to thank several people in particular for helping make this event a success.

Sightsavers – The charity itself of course. Thank you so much for being receptive to this idea and taking a chance on me.

Sinister1 – For getting me exposure on Twitch front page and giving good advice on how to proceed the day of the event.

Brad – Has a bot in my chat on normal streams, but for the event Brad set up some special commands to talk about the charity, donations, prizes, and all that good stuff.

Amalthes – For the stream layout, sorry I didn’t get to implement all of it together.

All the chat mods – For keeping everything together with several thousand viewers. When the streamer is blindfolded and can’t really direct the conversation or the chat, I don’t remember hearing about anything bad happening.

Everyone who donated – Thank you all so much for helping me achieve my goal and contribute to a fantastic charity.

And really, everyone who was there to cheer me on, give me support, and help make the event a success. After being in the speedrun community for over a decade, and being on twitch/justin for over 6 years, it was nice to give something back and for a good cause.