Power Up or Power Nap: A tale of Roq’s 24 hour gaming marathon

This year we chose to support Derian House Children’s Hospice, a local charity which the Roq Community Ambassadors have wished to support for a while now. Being a Community Ambassador at Roq, I have a large say in the organisation of our annual Power Up events, and this time we were very keen to support a local charity that means a lot to our colleagues.

Derian House Children’s Hospice provides specialist care and respite to children and young people with life-limiting or life-shortening conditions. The hospice covers the South of Cumbria, the entire of Lancashire and the North of Manchester. The cost to provide their incredibly valuable services stands at a whopping £5m per year; so it’s only right for us at Roq to do our bit.

I’ve partaken in Roq’s Power Up 24 hour gaming marathon a number of times now, and we usually begin the slog at around 9am on a Saturday morning – Having struggled in previous years, I came up with the idea of starting a little bit earlier (there is a science behind this, I promise). After a brief chat with some of my fellow gamers, we decided to go ahead with the change.

Boy, did it make a difference!

Starting at 7am on Saturday 5th March, we arrived at The Roq Office in Chorley with a number of consoles and PCs to keep us busy, and ample caffeine to help keep us awake! A huge variety of games were enjoyed, which really adds to the experience for me as I get to watch some of my colleagues play some interesting games from their eclectic libraries, that are rather different games to those I’m used to.

Personally I stuck mainly to sports games and shooters, with Spider-Man: Miles Morales keeping me company through the early hours of the morning.

As the hours ticked on, some of the gamers (mainly myself) got progressively more delirious as more and more sugar and caffeine was consumed – not a lifestyle I recommend but it’s all for a good cause, right?!

And usually there’s A LOT of nodding heads as the finish line approaches, but this year hardly any of the ~20 gamers struggled as we smashed our target of £631, raising a whopping £830 so far!

As 7 o’clock Sunday morning passed, we began to pack up our equipment, swearing blind that we’d never play another video game again! Silly things are said in the heat of the moment, and I cannot wait for next time…

For anyone contemplating an attempt of such a bonkers challenge, I firstly recommend giving it some serious thought… but here are just a few tips to help you succeed! Try to keep hydrated – water really helps! Play a variety of games! And multiplayer is your friend, if you can get some competition going, this will really help you break monotony and combat the fatigue!

If you’d like to find out more about Roq’s Power Up challenges and/or donate to the cause, please just ask or head to our JustGiving page.