Bringing gamers together is important to us here at Kongregate, and one of our newest ways to build community is our recent participation in Extra Life, a gaming charity that benefits local children’s hospitals. In 2016, we ran our very first Extra Life event and got a pretty overwhelming response, raising over $10,000 for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Our 2017 Extra Life event is planned for November 4, 2017, and we’re excited to help kids once more!

What is Extra Life?

Extra Life is a charity that brings together gamers from around the world in a 24-hour gaming marathon to support Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. It's like being part of a running marathon, but instead of all that exhausting running, you play games without sleeping. Many teams around the United States and Canada all play to raise money to help pay for expensive medical equipment or specialized treatment for hospital staff.

You are not required to livestream your gaming, but many of the teams do, including us. Twitch is a huge supporter of Extra Life and features a lot of the streams on their homepage throughout the event, so we’ll be streaming on Extra Life Day with everyone else!

What does Kongregate do for Extra Life?

Last year was our very first time being part of Extra Life, and Kongregate staff had a lot of fun. We gathered suggestions for games from our community and put together a schedule of games that staff would be streaming. On game day, we played a bunch of our favorite games, like XCOM, Don’t Starve Together, and Overwatch, and ran a challenge on the side to see how many Kongregate badges we could earn during that 24-hour period, which turned out to be 106 badges. We even let users participate in the party game Jackbox with us. As the end of the event rolled around, everyone was very visibly sleepy and giggly, because a lack of sleep will do that to you, but we all had a good time! We’ll be doing more of that this year, and we hope to improve on our successes last year.

What now?

We’d love to have your donations, if you’re interested! Just go to our Extra Life page to donate to the kids, or just come and watch our Twitch stream starting at 10:00 a.m. Pacific on November 4, 2017. You can also find our schedule in our forums. We hope to see you there!