The final tournament is here! The Tournament of Champions! Which song will reign supreme as the ultimate video game song?

This tournament has a unique format. It will be a hybrid of Swiss and double elimination. Songs will be paired in head-to-head matchups, but don’t immediately get eliminated when they lose. Instead, losing songs will be paired with other losing songs in the next round, and songs that lose there are eliminated. Then in the next round the surviving one-loss songs will be joined by fresh losers from the zero-loss bracket, and the process will continue. After 7 rounds of this, we will have 16 remaining songs (2 undefeated, 14 one-loss) and will then transition to a straightforward single-elimination.

These rounds will follow knockout round rules; they will last for just 24 hours, and they will feature 32 songs in 16 head-to-head matchups. Round 1 Day 1 will last until ~9AM Pacific on July 8th.

I won’t be providing playlists for each round, but you can listen to a playlist of all 256 songs in our tournament here.

Finally, I’d like to recognize two groups of songs from the LCQ. First off, the songs that were nominated directly by us, that managed to defeat high-performers from previous tournaments to earn a berth in this one

And we should also extend our condolences to songs that pre-qualified for the LCQ yet couldn’t quite make it to the TOC. These are very successful songs but sadly they will not be joining us for this.