It’s finally time. After almost 6 years of tournaments, we’ve reached present day. And so, only one task remains before us: we pit the champions of all out previous tournaments against each other, and determine the true best video game song. The champion of champions, whose reign shall last for all of time.
But first! We’re having ourselves a little pre-tournament to fill out the bracket. Here’s how it works. You can see every song that earned an auto-bid to the Tournament of Champions here.1 Additionally, you can see every song that is already qualified for this pre-tournament here.2 But in addition to these, we’re taking nominations. What song do you think was dealt with unfairly in its tournament? What song did we just plumb forget to nominate in the first place?
Each person will have 25 songs they’re allowed to nominate, and give one final chance to. You may nominate any video game song that debuted before 2025. 2025 itself is not legal, since the rest of our tournaments end in 2024 and I feel that’s only fair. Same rules as usual, the song has to be from video games as a medium, it can’t be a real world song that happens to be associated with a game. (RIP “Butterfly”, you’ll always be a DDR original in my non-European heart) Please make sure your song isn’t already nominated before submitting!
Nominations will be live until Sunday, June 8th at 9:00am Pacific. Tournament format to be determined, I wanna see how big the field winds up but I plan to get funky with it. 108 songs will be advancing to the tournament of champions proper, so we will be somehow whittling down our pool of candidates to that.
You can nominate songs here
All nominated songs are listed here
Songs already qualified for the main tournament are listed here
If you wanna jog your memory, you can see all nominated songs from all previous tournaments below. (Note that there will be severe link rot, and a couple songs listed were later disqualified when someone caught they weren’t video game natives. Caveat emptor)
Prehistory
1983-1989
1990-1995
1996-2000
2001-2004
2005-2008
2009-2012
2013-2016
2017-2020
2021-2022
2023-2024