THE BATTLE THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR, BUT YOU'RE GETTING ANYWAY!

You just *had* to ask that, didn't you? Sigh... well, I'm NeoVid, the guy who, despite not coming up with the idea, or the name, or anything original at all, is in charge here. If you want to know the story of how this GMCA thing started, I'm the guy to ask. But since I'm doing this, you won't have to waste my valuable time by asking. Ya got that?

All right, it all started long ago... November '99, I think, at Improfanfic (if you don't know about them, how'd you get here?) when Matt Harrison went on the Improfanfic message board with his idea of something sort of like Improparty, but fighting-based. It started a flamewar, due to it being obvious to anyone with a braincell still working that an SI fighting tournament couldn't work. Well, the people who didn't have any brains found their imaginations captured by the idea. The original supporters were BWA (more lurky than Lurker), myself (Impro's Least Contributing Author), Chaobino (who actually controlled an indie site), Jonatan Streith (former Savior of Impro), Yun [just add romanization] (the fanatic's fanatic), and (\/)ajin (who might have been admin if I wasn't so domineering). There were a few other people who joined up early... but I can't remember who they are, so they must have not done much. Eheh.

I personally believed that this idea could work if we copied the Octagon Rumble in several ways, especially making sure to clamp limitations on the fighters... in fact, at the time it came up, I was already mostly through a movelist for myself, which (in an idea copied from the OR's accidental creator Wanderer) I had been intending to post at Impro to see what happened. As it turned out, there were nearly as many people who wanted to join as there were people who knew it would be a disaster, and one of them had control of an indie site, so we went over to L-sama Productions and have been quite happy there, except for the way this project has already chewed up three webmasters. Well, the last thing we dared to say about the GMCA on the Impro message board was to ask for a name for it. One of our top supporters (and second doomed webmaster), the Black Wyvern of Armorica (aka BWA, aka 'Vern-chan, aka Slithery Jabroni) thought of the Grand Merchandisable Clash of Authors, and should've set the tone for the whole thing right there.

But it didn't. I originally wanted this to be a very non-serious event, but then when I volunteered my own universe for the hosting, control of the tournament went to hell (literally). What has ended up setting the tone is the "Authors" part of the name; most entrants have brought in characters that were created for worlds absolutely nothing like this, and in some cases, have been used for years, so it's become a study in getting nearly incompatible characters to work with each other. But that's the fun part. Well, one of the fun parts. The other is screwing around in-character on the message board. (Ask about the Fanservice Pic Scandal sometime, and be prepared to go into some seriously weird territory.)

From those few supporters, it eventually expanded to the point where we couldn't even fit in everyone who wanted to join. We've lost a few people... Matthew himself mysteriously disappeared, and we've gone through, ummm... five announcers by now. (And five admins, too! Burnout ain't nice. We're hopeful about the multiadmin solution, though. -JS) We've sort of become a crossover, too, with the OR's MultiMediocre Knight and the head of the Anime Capsule Rumble signing up. And mentioning the GMCA anywhere else only causes a flamewar half the time now!

Though there's some dispute about this, the GMCA is technically an extremely non-standard Improfic. As it is, we have every expectation of getting a fight scene done. Any month now. I'm not kidding.

--NeoVid, organizer


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