LogFAQs > #914514595

13.



I won't try to comment on the moment to moment drama of this match, if it was fair or any of that. That's not really why it's up this high. My understanding is this one only ran 22 hours due to a two hour downtime early in the match. This is one of the few contest matches on this list that I don't remember watching and I never feel comfortable relying on oral histories from others, especially when they are written for maximum drama. You can read about it on the wiki from people who can write better than I can.

Instead, I want to comment on what I think are the two most important aspects of this match:

1. Samus isn't immediately thought of as a top tier character. She's not an icon on the level of a Mario, Mega Man or Sonic. Samus is well-known and liked but she doesn't jump off the page as someone who could win a contest. She's not niche like Crono, but any random fan without contest knowledge would automatically pick Solid Snake or Mario over her in terms of general popularity.

This is her coming out party, going head to head with a legit icon and coming out on top. Her results in previous rounds do show that, but in 2002 you wouldn't have immediately thought that Samus was on Sonic's level. This match also isn't like Mario/Cloud where something clearly went wrong. Metroid Prime and Fusion weren't out yet in summer 2002 and we were all super confused as to how you turn Metroid into a first person game. There wasn't any Prime hype going on - we were all just baffled. This is the weakest form of Samus that we will ever get and she STILL hung even with Sonic. We talk about how amazing it is that Crono is legit, but Samus, having essentially just two slightly niche Metroid games and Smash, isn't that far from that.

2. This is the first super close matchup in contest history. DK/Aya was the previous closest, a 51/49 match that ended with DK winning by 1300 votes. Contests are all about those intense battles and this is the first of its kind. That's worth something.

This match, and the two that follow, put contests on the map. The contests were starting to draw a lot of attention from across the internet. Samus/Sonic deserves some credit for that. It's really fun to look back at this match and try to imagine what the reaction was like. Everyone certainly had Sonic in their bracket and Samus doing so well was probably really confusing. You could say that this is the first great upset in the contests -- sorry, overrated 1 and 2 seeds, but you don't qualify -- and this kicked off what could be the greatest week in contest history. Only spring 2004 can compete.
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xyzzy