Welcome to the fourth Game Music Thunderdome!
What is the Game Music Thunderdome? The rules are simple:
- Everyone nominates four pieces of game music
- They’re shuffled up and pitted against one another in bloody single combat (ie. we vote on our preferred tunes until there is only one victor)
It’s fun and a great way to get exposed to some new music. We’ve done three before:
Enter the Game Music Thunderdome
Game Music 2: Beyond Thunderdome
Game Music 3: A Sound of Thunderdome
Nomination Process
- Nominations are open from now until Saturday 29th May. Voting will start the following Monday, 31st May.
- You may nominate up to 4 tracks of your choice.
- All tracks must be original to a video game (no licensed tracks or remixes).
- Do not re-nominate tracks from previous Thunderdomes! Yes, Lonely Rolling Star should have won last time, but it’s time to let go, geggis. You can find a list of all previously nominated tracks here: Qt3 Game Music Thunderdome MASTER LIST - Google Sheets
- To nominate your tracks, enter them into this sheet: Qt3 Game Music 4: Thunderdome Eternal SIGNUP - Google Sheets. Feel free to post or discuss your nominations in this thread as well, but the sheet is the source of truth for compiling the bracket.
- When adding nominations, please CTRL+F and make sure nobody else has already entered them.
- Nominated tracks must be in a format that can be embedded in this thread. This can be a YouTube or artist Bandcamp/Soundcloud link, for example, which should automagically embed a player. People need a super simple way to listen to each nominated track within the thread.
- If you want to nominate a track that is not currently available to embed, you can upload it yourself to YouTube. A painless way to do this if you have an mp3 is to use tunestotube.com.
- If you want to nominate a single track that is part of a longer video on Youtube, the best solution is to re-upload it yourself a la carte. If you aren’t able to, you can specify the start and end timestamps in the link itself. For example, ‘&start=1m20s&end=3m05s’ placed at the end of a Youtube link will run from the 1 minute, 20 second mark to the 3 minute, 5 second mark.
Tournament Structure
- The tournament will have a group stage, followed by a single elimination bracket.
- All voting rounds will be posted on weekdays and open for a minimum of 24 hours.
- In the case of ties, they will extend for an additional 24 hours in sudden death. If nobody breaks the tie we’ll enlist The Tiebreakers–three maybe five hired guns outside the competition who will determine the victor.
- All nominations are shuffled into groups of 4. In the group stage, we will post one group at a time. Give each track a fair listen, then rate it from 1-5 in the poll.
-
Don’t be afraid to use the whole scale! Seriously, it helps avoid ties. As a quick guide:
1 - make it stop!
2 - general feeling of dislike
3 - well it’s OK I guess
4 - this is good
5 - hot damn I love it! - Voting is public, and light banter and trash talk is encouraged. However, if anyone is uncomfortable with this, you may PM either @geggis or @krayzkrok your votes and we’ll incorporate them manually.
- Please rate honestly, use the whole scale, and do not game the system by artificially downvoting other tracks to boost your own nominee’s chances. It’s totally fine and expected to give your own nominee a 5 though, as it’s assumed that you nominated it because you love it.
- At the end of the group stage, the track with the highest score in each group will advance to the single elimination bracket.
- To catch any high scoring losers from the group stage, there will be ‘wildcard’ slots to get the single elimination bracket up to a tidy number. Never underestimate the wildcards!
Good luck, and have fun!
