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.

Surprise! New plan: today the final 2 undefeated songs will face off; the winner of that will be our winners’ bracket champion, and earn a berth in the grand finals. The 14 remaining 1-loss songs will face off as normal, and next round, the 7 survivors of that will be joined by the loser of winners’ finals in an 8-song single elimination bracket to determine the losers’ bracket champion. Whichever song wins that faces the winners’ champ in our grand finals.

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 8 will last until ~9AM Pacific on August 25th.

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