FINAL RESULTS
And so the tournament ends on a quiet note… and the People’s Champion of 2025 is Never Gives Up Her Dead! (Congratulations, @mathbrush!)
Match #63: Never Gives Up Her Dead handily outscored Augmented Fourth on Day 1, taking a three point lead by day’s end and maintaining it unchanged for almost the entire match. A pair of additional votes for the match leader on the last day were the cherries on top of the sundae, bringing the final score to 7-2. This outcome is entirely in accordance with the wisdom of the crowd, as all but one prognosticator called this tournament win even before the first round began.
Augmented Fourth is the only published work by author Brian Uri listed on IFDB. Nominated for both Best Puzzles and Best Individual NPC in the 2000 XYZZY Awards (but winner of neither), it had a tremendous run versus its anticipated performance – fully half of future-scrying fans expected it to lose in Round 1 against Winter Storm Draco, and only a single fan expected it to progress beyond Round 2. The long-form comedic puzzler, obviously strongly influenced by the Infocom canon and perhaps also by LucasArts’ Loom, finally met its match in the championship bout. Game and author receive their laurels to sustained crowd applause, then salute PCT Fans @dfranke and @Morningstar, who nominated the game for the tournament. As the crowd extends its congratulations and condolences, the runners-up stand aside as the victors make their way onto the stage…
The crowd cheers wildly as Never Gives Up Her Dead and author Brian Rushton accept the first ever People’s Champion trophy and turn to take a bow. One of the newest works in the tournament, Never Gives Up Her Dead was crafted with an old school sensibility that retains a commitment to modern standards of player-friendliness, and its scale is far greater than has been typical in recent years. Released outside of any competition, it has slowly gained a core of five-star votes from impressed players on IFDB, a phenomenon that only accelerated after it broke into the IFDB Top 100 late last year. [Historical note: With its voting record, Never Gives Up Her Dead should have been eligible for the Free IF Playoffs of 2024, but a bug in the Top 100 list’s generating code kept the game from appearing at the time that candidates were determined.] Its quiet climb up the charts – like its quiet climb through the ranks of this tournament – has continued unabated, and it has recently made its way to the #10 spot on the Top 100 list, displacing Toby’s Nose. Although it has not been nominated for any XYZZY Awards due to their much-delayed production, Never Gives Up Her Dead did win in both the Outstanding Game Over 2 Hours and Outstanding Science Fiction Game categories for the 2023 IFDB Awards. The crowd gives author and work a standing ovation as this new distinction is bestowed.
The win by Never Gives Up Her Dead also brings honor to the three PCT Fans who nominated it, only one of whom, @simpsong00, has so far revealed his sponsorship. (Will the other two ever reveal themselves? Only time will tell…) Although the triple nomination was certainly a good omen, there were no guarantees; the only other triple-nominee, Laura Knauth’s Winter Wonderland, was eliminated in Round 1 by Metamorphoses, which itself went on to become Division 4 champion before losing to Never Gives Up Her Dead in the semi-finals.
With a final blast of the trumpets, the crowd slowly grows quiet to hear the outcome of the tournament’s Official Prediction Game. Two first-place winners’ names are called: @bg and @FLACRabbit, each of whom correctly predicted the results of 34 out of 60 matches (56.7%). Congratulations to both of you! Second place goes to mathbrush, with 33 out of 60 matches called (51.6%). Nobody did as well percentage-wise as we saw in FIFP, in which predictions for Round 1 were not included. Thanks to everyone who submitted predictions – if it weren’t for you, the author interviews wouldn’t have been possible.
Thank you also to everyone in the PCT Fans group who participated in the voting on matches and the various mid-game polls! With 39 registered players, a substantial chunk of the forum was represented, and the combined view count of around 10,000 across all PCT threads was comparable to the Free IF Playoffs. As with last year’s tournament, the PCT literally would not have been possible without you.
The same is true to the authors of every work nominated for the tournament, including the 41 games that were not picked in the contestant lottery – although as a group we spent many hours engaging with and appreciating these works, none of us spent as much time with them as their authors. Thank you all for putting such a bounty before us through your creativity and hard work.
Special thanks also to mathbrush for once again volunteering to provide expert commentary about competing games, and to authors @severedhand (link), @Draconis (link), and mathbrush (link) for agreeing to last-minute author interviews about their crowd-pleasing games that won upset victories. I sure enjoyed reading their answers, and I hope that others did, too.
A final special thank you to lead moderator @HanonO for his support and encouragement, and for making a special virtual space to hold this event – now turned into a wider playground for everyone!
Thanks for playing and watching, and… start thinking about next year’s event! Proposed formats so far include the IF Olympics and the Great Play Marathon, and suggestions for new options are always welcome. (I have a half-baked idea for IF Iron Chef that is starting to come together…)