(As remembered by 'smozoma', July 2018)
(Scroll down if you want to go straight to the game results)
Brainchild of Mikey McBryan (whom you may know from TV's Ice Pilots NWT), the first NHL'94 World Championship event starts at 9am in (according to some anyway) the centre of the hockey Universe, downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada!
The event is held at Real Sports Bar & Grill, right next to Air Canada Centre where the Leafs play. In the main concourse of the bar, tables are being prepared for a critical late-season double-header between the Blue Jays and Yankees. In the booth area of the bar, 14 TVs are hooked up to rectangular, age-yellowed Super Nintendo Entertainment System consoles and sleek, black Sega Genesis consoles.
Mikey is filming the event as part of his NHL'94 documentary, Pixelated Heroes. The film crew is setting up cameras and lights throughout the area.
Also reserved for the tournament is the raised mezzanine area of the bar, with drinks, food, and unexpectedly-influential couches for the tournament participants to make use of.
Participants stream in after collecting their nametag and lanyard. 128 have paid and registered but there are a few no-shows on the day.
About half the participants are members of the NHL94.com forums. Some have been playing against each other online for over a decade, but most have never actually met each other or played each other face-to-face. Several players have "come out of retirement" for the tournament. The online players are the runaway favourites coming into the tournament, but not everything goes as expected.
Mikey welcomes the crowd and hands things over to 'Halifax' (aka Darrell Sampson in his non-94 life) to announce the rules and get things started.
The tournament is designed for 64 Sega Genesis players and 64 SNES players to play separate tournaments, culminating in a champion-vs-champion console war matchup at the end of the night (which turns into a story of its own. Sledge hammers and noise complaints are involved.)
To begin with, each group of 64 is broken up into 4 smaller 16-player groups, playing triple-elimination brackets until only 4 players in each group remain, resulting in 16 players qualifying for the Top-16 bracket. The Top-16 bracket is another triple-elimination bracket.
A veteran online league player with a number of deep playoff runs. Has an aggressive and effective manual goalie.
One of the top online players, but hasn't played in a few years. Does he still have it? Uses a stop-and-start attacking style that puts opponents out of position.
Another tough online player, relatively new to the scene. Attacks from the corner.
Host of Twin Galaxies Settle it on the Screen podcast, and former Twin Galaxies NHL'94 world record holder. He can whip the CPU, but can he compete with people?
The group bracket is triple elimination. This table shows the players who have not yet lost a game, culminating in the match for 1st place. When a player loses, they are relegated to the 1-loss bracket that decides 2nd and 3rd place in the group.
This is Group A's 1-Loss bracket. It culminates in a match deciding the 2nd and 3rd place finishers in the group.
One of the most dominant players of the early days of online NHL'94, IAmFleury'sHipCheck (aka EA) comes out of retirement for the tournament. Has a scoring moved named after him (The EA Special) which consists of lobbing a soft wrister at the goalie then collecting the rebound and scoring while the goalie is down.
A top current online player. I'm not too familiar with his play style but I do know that I've never beaten him in the 10 or so times we've played.
Another tough online player, relatively new to the scene. Attacks from the corner.
Hasn't played online much, but is the cousin of kgman. What skills has he picked up playing against one of the best?
Once again, the 2nd seed beats the 1st seed! Zeppelin55 didn't really blow anyone out on his path to the 1st seed, so it could be that this was a very tough group. kgboy showed that he had plenty of skill, including a 9-6 barnburner loss against IAmFleury'sHipCheck.
I (smozoma) won my game, but, as you might expect in the first 20 minutes of the first time running a huge tournament, computer issues cropped up and a score was entered wrong in the rush to fix things (there were no further problems after that!), sending me down to the 2nd/3rd seed bracket right away, putting a lot of games between me and moving on to the Final 16.
Our apologies as the remaining write up is incomplete. Howeve, you can review the triple elimination brackets below. The top 4 from each group qualified for the final group in triple elimination.