Direct Relief Gaming is an organization that raises money for humanitarian aid charity Direct Relief through gaming, oftentimes partnering with streamers for individual charity streams or hosting larger-scale special streaming events. Later this week, Direct Relief Gaming will be putting on its annual Mario Masters Colosseum event, showcasing 25 of the most skilled or just plain fun Mario players. They’ll be playing Mario games from throughout the franchise’s history, as well as some Mario fan mods and a few other semi-/unrelated games, all broadcast from within the same house.
Last year’s event raised over $100,000 for Direct Relief over a four-day period. This year, Mario Masters Colosseum will take place from September 5 to September 8, with streams from roughly 12:00 PM to 12:00 AM each day. The 25 featured streamers will be a mix of faces new and returning to the event, including Grand POOBear, Spikevegeta, Kelpsey, Xwater and more. The stream will take place on Grand POOBear’s Twitch channel over the course of the four day period.
The event will kick off with levels from Super Mario Maker 2, the newest addition to the Mario canon, before players jump into couple of Mario fan games and mods. Day One will be capped off by the home game edition of Family Feud between teams of streamers (and possibly be followed by a bonus game afterword if an incentive is met). Subsequent days will similarly feature high level gameplay, in both canon entries to the Mario series and modded Mario games, as well as board games like Jeopardy and Werewolf to conclude the following day’s events.
A full schedule of featured games is available here.
Also showcased will be runs of Super Mario 64 and Zelda: A Link to the Past utilizing CrowdControl, which allows users in Twitch chat to have an effect on gameplay. The event’s final game will be a Super Mario Odyssey Moon race. Which individual streamers will be playing which games has yet to be announced.
Given the nature of the event, expect plenty of charity incentive-driven hijinks, both of the insanely high level gamelpay variety, and the purely silly. Mario Masters Colosseum will kick off on September 3 at 12:00 PM.
