At ESA we want you to put your best foot forward. This means submitting your main categories of speedruns and showcases that you believe fulfill the following three criteria

• Show off your personal talent at the category (experience trumps novelty)
• Enable you to be most entertaining and engaging with the audience
• Will create the best environment for fundraising to take place

It does not matter if you or your game have been previously featured at ESA or other speedrunning events, nor does it matter how long ago, the more the submission matches above criteria, the better.

During the game selection process we may reach out in private to ask for more information about your run and/or discuss potential variations. To make that as easy as possible for us please make sure you are on the ESA Discord and have your social media links up to date on oengus.io.

If you have any questions about whether or not your idea for the event might work, don't hesitate to reach out to Edenal!

Guidelines

There is a limit of five submissions per runner. This includes different categories. You can exceed this maximum by being part of a race or co-op run another runner has submitted. These do not count towards your personal total.

We suggest adding a leaderboard link for your game (or making your own if it doesn’t exist yet) so we can more easily keep track of your times.

What can go wrong will go wrong. Actively practice no-reset runs and have backup strategies (or save files) ready in case something never happened before. Your estimate should include enough time that you should almost never go over estimate, and the estimate we publish on the schedule may differ from the estimate submitted.

You are welcome to submit any showcase including non-speedrun showcases. Non-complete game categories will be allowed provided they are accepted by the individual communities.

The amount of shown game feeds is generally limited to two. That means race submissions with more than two participants will need to have adjustments made in order to be considered. Coop showcases with more than two players may still go ahead as planned, but only two feeds will be captured and shown on the layout.

Emulator runs are allowed

If your showcase includes licensed music, please make sure it can be completely muted or otherwise be removed. Please be mindful of this when planning music game showcase tracklists. Exceptions may be granted and have been in the past.

Submission Form

We use Oengus.io to accept submissions. If you’re using Oengus for the first time, you will need to register. We also require you to be on the ESA Discord Server. The reason is simple: Discord will be the main tool for all forms of communication leading up to the event and also the way for the game selection and scheduling team to contact you.

If you wish to make changes (e.g. category, estimate) tag @Games and Schedule on discord. We might not be able to change your submission directly, but it will be recorded in our spreadsheets and on the schedule.

If you are submitting races, co-op runs or anything else with multiple people, only one person will be required to submit it. They then hand out a group code being created to other participants who then join the multiplayer submission by entering the code in the bottom of the submission form. Make sure that everybody gets and uses this code.

Charity and Fundraising

ESA is at it's core a fundraising event and that means a representitive of the event is going to be present during your run. Their job is to read out donations, plug the charity and hype up the crowd whenever big donations happen. On stream one they'll appear on camera while reading donations, on stream two they'll just be a voice. It's important when submitting you consider this is a showcase in aid of a cause!

Incentives / Bid Wars & Bonus Games

Donation incentives and bid wars are a way for viewers to interact with and/or add content to your showcase through donating to a good cause. From character name changes to adding entire bonus games, anything is possible!

When submitting incentives simply submit your top level ideas about how your game can be changed through incentives. We'll reach out to shape these ideas into final proposals.

The Cut(s)

There will be two rounds of selections:

The first cut will pick out all the games we are interested in and already confirm a good amount of the final picks. This usually happens two to three weeks after the end of the submission phase. Every showcase that has been cut can still make a comeback depending on what we are looking for.

The second cut will happen at the same time as the schedule release.

"Chase Games" & Unreleased Games

Chase games are games that we would like to have in the marathon but have either not been released by the end of the first submission phase or have come out too recently for the showcase to be refined enough. For these particular games and also others we may have missed we will have a separate submission phase opening up a few days before schedule release and lasting only three days. Please do not submit unreleased games during the first submission phase.

The list of chase games for each event will be announced in the information page specific to that event. Just submitting these games will not guarantee them a spot in the marathon. We will hold them and you to the same standards as all other games.

Chase games as a concept are event-specific. Not every event will have chase games.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions, DM any member with the Game and Schedule role on the ESA Discord. Ask in #marathon-talk if you need pointed in the right direction - we’re happy to help.