AADL GT - Ann Arbor

The AADL-GT is a product of the Ann Arbor District Library. The GT (Game Tournaments) is a series of video game tournaments that begin in August and culminate in a Grand Championship event in December. The events usually draw between 75 and 100 competitors but more than 150 different people competed in season three, and there is also a dedicated staff that runs the event. The siblings and parents of the competitors also attend just to watch their family member compete. Many estimate that between 300 and 400 people have viewed the DVD of the broadcast of the Grand Championships of Season 1. The AADL-GT takes place in the multipurpose room of the main branch of the Ann Arbor District Library. This event is sometimes carried by Ann Arbor's local Community Television Network (CTN). There is often commentary for these events, supplied by both current and former GT competitors.

First Season

The first logo of the AADL-GT Series

During the first season, Mario Kart: Double Dash was the only game that was played in the tournament. Each competitor used a single TV and Gamecube to compete, and all 8 of the TVs (referred to as "stations") were connected into one single Local Area Network (LAN). The season consisted of four monthly regular season tournaments, starting in August, and a grand championship event that took place in December.

The monthly tournaments consisted of single-player events in both the race and battle modes, followed by a co-op race event, all of which were used as qualifiers for a final battle event for the monthly prizes. The top four finishers in each month's events automatically qualified for the Grand Championships. The Grand Championships in December consisted of a wild card event, which was used to allow newer competitors into the finals who hadn't qualified thus far. Then, the main qualifiers began, consisting of the wildcard qualifiers and the competitors who already qualified earlier in the season. and a single player racing event as a qualifier. The elimination rounds were four player battle events, where the top two competitors moved on to the next round. The final battle was between John Durski, D-Rex, Duck (also known as Sir Ducksalot), and TurtlePerson2. John Durski was eliminated fairly early into the round, finishing 4th place. He was then followed by D-Rex, who, by finishing third place, won a Game Boy Advance SP. When only Sir Ducksalot and TurtlePerson2 remained, Duck eliminated himself in order to win the second place prize, a new Nintendo DS as opposed to an Apple iPod. To this day, TurtlePerson2 still asserts that he could have beaten Sir Ducksalot fair and square, but this situation has never been reproduced.

The Grand Championships in December were also the first of the tournaments to be broadcast on CTN. This broadcast was then edited down and put onto a DVD, which has been distributed across the country to other librarians trying to replicate the success of the tournaments at the Ann Arbor District Library. The broadcast was made to be a very close replica of an actual sporting event, complete with introductions, information about the tournament, play-by-play and color commentary, and even commercials (which were edited out for the DVD release). The commentary for the broadcast was provided by "Major Tom" Coveney and Daniel "Leina" Burgener, two of the older competitors who had been to the tournaments since they started that August.

Second Season

The logo of the second AADL-GT Season

The second season created momentous change within the AADL-GT, when it added the wildly popular Gamecube game Super Smash Brothers Melee to the mix. The season also began in July with an added pre-season event. For this season, since there were two games to play, the events started with a round of Super Smash Bros. single-player event, then a team battle event, also in Super Smash Bros. Then, The competitors would participate in the Mario Kart: Double Dash events, which still included a single-player and team events, same as the first Season.

Clans were also implemented in this season. Clans were a group of up to four people who compete as a team as well as individually. Their scores were then added together, and the top four clans were entered into a Clan Cup at the December Grand Championships.

A controversial addition was the "SurPrize round" at each monthly tournament. Since there were two games at the tournament now, it wouldn't be fair to have one game determine who got the prizes, as one competitor could be better than the other at a certain game. The SurPrize round used a randomly determined game that had good multiplayer settings to decide who finished in the top 3 at each monthly tournament. This was a replacement for the battle round from the previous season. Some players complained that the surprise round favored players who spent more money on video games, while advocates said that a surprise game required more gaming skill and less practice.

The Grand Championships of the second season were in a similar format to the season tournaments. There was again another Wildcard event, and then the combined set of competitors competed in first a Super Smash single-player event, followed by a Mario Kart event. Instead of using Mario Kart: Double Dash or Super Smash Bros. Melee for an elimination game, the top 16 players competed in a game of Root Beer Tapper, and the four highest scoring competitors moved onto the finals. The top four competitors were Sir Ducksalot, Jerry, Monkeyman, and Leinad. The final game was the classic video game Pong. Sir Ducksalot, being somewhat of a connoisseur of older video games, easily won the Pong competition, followed by Jerry in second, Monkeyman in third, and the commentator Leinad in fourth place. At this season's Grand Championships, instead of assigning certain prizes to certain places, the competitors were offered a pick from four prizes. This was done to prevent diving from competitors to get the prizes they wanted, as Sir Ducksalot had done in the previous Season.

All of the regular season tournaments were broadcast in Season 2, not just the Grand Championships. "Major Tom" Coveney and Daniel "Leina" Burgener again provided commentary for the broadcasts, but were replaced at points during the tournaments when they were called on to compete in the various events. They were replaced by fellow competitors such as Sir Ducksalot and Muffincat, just to name a few. The DVD of Season 2 has still not been released, as it has required extensive editing to put all of the tournaments together to fit on one DVD. To advertise for the tournaments, a commercial was made featuring various competitors and information about the tournaments which can be seen here.

Third Season

The third season again brought large changes to the way that the games in the tournament were played. This Season, it was decided that there would not be a single-player culminating event at each monthly tournament. Instead of having a single-player event for the finals of each tournament, a greater emphasis was put on Clans, and there was a final Clan Cup event at the end of each monthly tournament. The four highest-scoring clans at the end of each tournament would compete in rounds of either Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart, and the lowest scoring clan would be eliminated. After the first round, the other game that was not played in the first round would be played in the second round. When two clans remained, a surprise game was revealed to determine the winner of that month's Clan Cup. Any clan that won the Clan Cup for a month was automatically entered into the Clan Cup to be held at the Grand Championships in December, and all of the members of the clan were individually qualified for the single-player Grand Championships.

Benefits of AADL-GT

AADL-GT represents a prime example in the debate over whether libraries should support video games. Some people think that video games are a negative influence on our children, this event shows otherwise. It is one of the largest and most successful no charge video game tournaments you can go to. This is also one of the few tournaments that is almost entirely tax money funded. The AADL-GT video game tournaments show that there is still life left in the library.

Prizes

The first season had prizes of gift cards to local stores which consisted of $70, $50 and $30 amounts for 1st through 3rd place. For the Grand Championship, the prize for first place was a 20GB Apple iPod engraved with "AADL-GT Season 1 Champion" on the back of it. The second place prize was a (at that time newly-released) Nintendo DS, and the third place player received the updated and backlit SP version of the Game Boy Advance.

The second season had two different prize-awarding events in the Grand Championships. For the newly-instated Clan Cup competition, the winning 4-member clan each received a 512MB First-generation iPod Shuffle. For the Grand Champion tournament, a new prize format was instated. To discourage the diving that allegedly occurred during the final event of the Season 1 Grand Championships, the order that competitors finished determined the order that they could pick from the prize pool. The prize pool for the Second season was similar to that of the First season. The iPod this time was the 30GB video-capable version, the Nintendo DS was the Mario Kart DS Bundle Pak, which included a limited edition Red-colored Nintendo DS and the Mario Kart DS game, and a newer, brighter version of the Game Boy Advance SP. Also thrown into the mix this time was the competitor to the Nintendo DS, the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP).

Eli Neiburger, the creator of the AADL-GT Series, holding the Third Season Grand Championship top prize, the Nintendo Wii.

For the third season, the prize format was dramatically changed for the monthly tournaments. Since there was no single-player culminating event at the monthly tournaments as there had been in the first two seasons (The battle eliminations in Season 1 and the SurPrize round in Season 2), the prize format was changed to give individual event winners their own gift cards. For each event (Single-player and team events in Super Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash), the winners received $40, $30, and $20 gift cards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places respectively. For the team events, the winning teams split the total of the prizes (i.e., the first place team received a $20 gift card for each player, 2nd place received $15 per player, and the third place team received $10 apiece). The prizes have finally been announced for the Grand Championship event in December. For the clan cup, each of the six members in the winning clan will receive the first-ever limited edition Clan Cup trophies, plus a small gift card of an as-of-yet unannounced value. For the Grand Champion event, the prize format will combine characteristics from the Grand Prize selections from the past two seasons. The selection will be from the newly-released Nintendo Wii, a 2GB Black iPod Nano, and an onyx black Nintendo DS. Again, the winners will get to select from the prize pool in the order that they finish, but there will only be major prizes awarded to the top 3 finishers overall.

Trivia

Joe Smolarski, a feared player during the first and second season, has not been to any of season 3.

A similar thing happened to Pro, who was in 1st place at the end of season 2, but never came back for season 3. He was in the same clan as Joe Smolarski.

The tournaments are run by Eli Neiburger, who along with others at the library have developed multiple applications used in running the tournaments.

Skills Dat Kills won the clan battle season 2, but merged with Noise Machine to form Bros and Co.

Two of We Are Hard's premier clan members (Shin Orachimaru and Omega, affectionately known as the Royster brothers) make a two hour trip every month to go to the tournament, they come all the way from Kalamazoo.

AADL-GT is often cited as an example for library-run gaming tournaments, see links.