Tournaments

These are summaries of my experiences form tournaments and events that I have attended that featured competitive Guitar Hero∞ and/or Rock Band.∞

Midnight Gaming Championship

The best place to start is with the first Guitar Hero tournament I attended. The initial run of the Midnight Gaming Championship∞ took place over two months in the fall of 2006. All of the tournaments occurred in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Prior to this tournament series, I had never really practiced or played much Guitar Hero. All of my music game experience had come from Bemani music games (Guitar Freaks, Beatmania, DDR, etc.). I had put a lot of time and effort into the Guitar Freaks series at a local arcade. An acquaintance of mine encouraged me to participate in the tournament because he figured my plastic guitar playing abilities would transfer over to Guitar Hero and that I'd have a chance at winning the event. Even though I had not played much Guitar Hero at this time, I did, in fact, already own a copy of the game.

MGC consisted of eight qualifier tournaments that culminated into a big championship tournament with nice prizes. I practiced and went to the tournament that took place on week three. The format was a single elimination bracket on expert difficulty and each player picked a song for that round. Both players would each play the two songs on their own TV in single player; highest combined score determined the winner. They did not use GH1's face-off thankfully. Also, a player could only pick a song as his/her choice once for the duration of the tournament. I made it to the semi-finals at the week four tournament, however, I lost in that round miserably when my opponent picked Cowboys From Hell.∞ After that week's qualifier, I didn't really think much about making it back out to another one of the qualifiers. I made my way back out to week five qualifier and almost didn't enter because I was there to mainly hang out with friends. I ended up winning. An interesting historical note is that my opponent in the finals of the week five qualifier was tipper queen.∞

The MGC events were a lot of fun because there were lots of oppurtunities to play casual Guitar Hero before and after the tournaments took place. I returned to the weeks six, seven, and eight qualifiers even though I couldn't enter because I had already won my spot to compete in the main tournament. I had the chance to talk to the other players and that's when I first learned about scorehero. I got on the site after hearing about it to input my scores and see where I stood. I never checked out the forums at this point. I just inputted scores and checked out other players that were participating in the MGC tournaments. I continued to practice and up my scores in preparation for the main tournament. I primarily practiced four songs: Cowboys From Hell∞, Bark at the Moon∞, Cheat on the Church∞, and Breaking Wheel.∞ Frankenstein∞ was also a song I was hoping to use during the finals. The championship tournament had the eight winners from the qualifiers along with other contestants from the qualifiers as wild cards. Tipper queen∞ made her way back to the main tournament as a wild card.

The championship tournament was an awesome experience for me. I made it through to the finals and had a chance to win. The format was the same from the qualifiers. My opponent picked No One Knows and I picked Frankenstein. I came out ahead in score by a decent margin and won. The prizes totalled $2500 in value. During the last couple of weeks MGC, Guitar Hero 2∞ had just come out. I stayed away from it and didn't buy it to keep my focus on the tournament. After the tournament was over, I immediately started playing Guitar Hero 2 a whole lot. I was very pleased with the game in comparison to GH1.

Winter CPL 2006

A month or so after MGC ended, I received an email that a GH2 tournament was going to happen at the CPL back in December of 2006. It was being run by the same people that ran MGC.

Work in progress