My knowledge of the early formation of the unhoard is pretty scant because I ended up being the latest one invited who stuck around until the end. I've heard talk of previous cancelled hoards that ended up sprawling into the one I was invited to, but not much, so I'll just tell the story from my perspective.
Picture this, it's 2:30 AM EST on September 8th, I'm laying in my bed, half-awake, chatting it up in Birdie's stream. Suddenly I get a Twitch whisper from Pogo like "hey qwerty can you check discord real quick." I check discord, Pogo gives me the rundown of what's happening, and I almost refuse because I felt like I'd be busy with school, but I join anyway. Will DMs me the invite, I join the server, I see that there's 8 other people in the hoard, and all I'm thinking is "wow that's a lot of people."
About 3 days later, Will makes an announcement that our hoard was gonna merge with another one, and everyone is thinking "it's probably just like 2 or 3 people." Will later makes another announcement that the hoard we're joining actually has more people in it than ours, everyone is keen now and we all get invites to the new hoard server. And let me tell you, this was a STACKED hoard we just fell into, it had lots of people (everyone from Project 2020 with the exception of Dr. Light, and some other people), lots of times, a color-coded spreadsheet for everything, it was much further ahead than ours.
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/JieMCDd.png)
Will's 2nd announcement, big leak right here folks
This event, what I refer to as "The Merger," is where the name of hoard comes from, though I'll go into that more later. It was a bit intimidating joining this hoard but I was very motivated to play after League burnt me out and I just played Mario Kart 64 for a month (casually getting a WR in the shortest lap in the game :smirk:)
THE TIMES/VIDEOS:
Facility 00 0:54 - Achieved September 12th, the day of The Merger. This was a continuation of my long and tedious Facility grind from earlier in the year before league started. I spent about 4 months trying to get 44/54/54 on the level, but league kept me at 55 on 00. I started my grind back up the day I joined the hoard, my first session was a Xela-style 10 hour session because it was my last day before school started. I naturally got some pretty troll runs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c-aU9R4dbA) over the course of the grind. But right after The Merger, myself, Canovah, and EC were in VC and I was able get the run while sharing my screen. This run is the only run I achieved while in VC throughout the hoard, and my laptop is not well equipped for screen sharing on Discord, and will frequently drop frames, but luckily that didn't happen on this run. The run itself is pretty weird, I get stuck leaving the console room yet it still managed to be open door pace, I got a wacky yet perfect boost down the labs to Doak from a guard, not from the mine that bounced way out, and my warp to Trev was slow, but a good Trev saved the run.
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/pyVInWB.jpg)
😺 this is the cat that chewed my wires btw
The idea of having a "Missing" poster for Doak was a very early idea of mine, yet it was one of the last videos I ended up making. I wanna give a big shoutout to BDown for printing the poster and going out to film with it, I didn't have a printer so I couldn't film myself, and BDown actually has a good camera, also apparently BDown hurt himself getting the poster off the tree so I basically had to use his shots. The song I used, "The Cinema Clock" by Sinking Ships is interesting because the B-side to the single, "Strangers," was featured in a Boards of Canada mixtape. It was uncredited and unidentified for a while, but when it was identified I listened to the single and took a liking to both songs. I used this song because it had a long and eerie intro that fit the feeling I was going for.
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/T0qd0Ga.jpeg)
The original Missing poster, the contact info was changed from projectcentury.club to "The Amalgamates" to avoid spoiling BK's involvement
Archives SA/00 0:54 - These times aren't amazing or anything but they were overdue for me. They don't seem very "hoard-worthy" but when you put these times in terms of them being 90+ pointers and giving me leaderboards then it sounds dumb not to hoard them. The grind went relatively quickly, for the first 3 days or so I was using 2.x inspired by Flechr's complete caking of the times with it, but I could never quite get the hang of the movement with 2.x on Archives. I switched to 1.2 and got a sort of legit 54 fail that day, then got SA 54 the next day. The SA 54 has quite a bit of stuckage in the first half but an insane Nat door and clean ending gave me 54. I then got 00 54 the next day on pretty much your standard fare clean 1.2 54. I also got each 54 on different versions of the game because I thought it was a good bit.
I didn't know what to do with the video for these runs for a long time but I decided I'd just play each run up to Mishkin then do a split-screen for both endings. Now the real centerpiece of the video was the song, the title theme from the N64 game Buck Bumble. I knew the song from memes and the sort for a while and it's just a good song anyways so I knew I ought to use it. In fact, the same "long time" where I didn't know what to do with the video, the only thing I had was using this song.
Silo A 1:02 - This time wasn't even in my original goal times for the hoard. At some point during my Aztec SA grind, I wanted something to watch while playing, and chose the Silo Agent Speedlore. A few minutes into the video, I'm just looking at the screen thinking, "this looks so much more fun than what I'm playing" and just decided to play Silo instead. Within a few minutes I get my first open door run (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXltsl4LWzU) and a dupe of 1:05, my PR at the time, with no open door. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3aTQXwFko) I take a break to do stuff and five minutes after starting playing again I get 1:04. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_roN8gU9SE) That's when I decide to get 1:03 for the hoard, and I actually got 1:03 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGwqZxStCtI) the next day on a run that I believe would've been a 1:02 had I not botched the lift at the end. I wasn't really satisfied with this run and I decided to play for 1:02, thinking it wouldn't take me long. But it actually ended up taking almost a month after getting 1:03 to get 1:02, and I had a run with a very odd ending that I wish I could explain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=336PBGpIdnA) the day before. The run was, as put by the people in VC during the premiere, 1:01 pace until the ending where I screw up the door to Ouro and get stuck one or two times, but my lift warp was very fast and pretty much saved the run from being another 1:03. So instead of me sitting here with a 1:03 with a bad ending, I'm now sitting here with a 1:02 with a bad ending :v.
The video for this time was the first music video I made for the hoard. I knew that it would be fitting to have Goose be the focus of the video since it's a Silo run and Silo is one of Goose's "levels" apparently, even though I don't tie or beat Goose in this run. At some point, Soulja Boy Goose managed to creep it's way back into my memory and that's when pretty much everything came together in terms of an idea. The video was pretty tedious to make, since I had to crop out goose for each frame to put into the Silo scenery, and the shaky camera meant I had to stabilize each frame too, but the fact that the video is at about 2 FPS meant I thankfully didn't have as many frames as I could've had. The "Soulja Soulja Goose" meme at the end was actually made in my editing software, not in some other program and imported in, it was a creative decision I promise. And by the way, the Fist-Bumping Goose was taken from the Frigate SA Speedlore, and the "YOU can get this time" from the Runway 00 Speedlore was too perfect not to use.
Aztec SA 1:33 - My most miserable grind ever, this was probably the least amount of fun I've ever had playing this game, and it's on the one difficulty of Aztec I can sort of stand! Within two days of getting Archives 00 54 I got a 1:34 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fHE0Krr_Xg) while killing a guard in the first room. The original plan was to use mainframe glass and skip the body armor to get a better time, but then EC and I noticed that Illu got a 1:33 on SA with mainframe glass by running the first room, so that's what we both started doing. This makes the run up to the glass INCREDIBLY troll since you have to headshot the guard in the hall for ammo and you don't have an AR33 to fire to lure the two guards out at the end of the hall to kill, this means you get boosted around constantly, even more so than usual. The grind for 1:33 consisted of me getting only a few runs to the glass in a few hours and either messing up the glass somehow or losing the run later. When a run didn't die by these means it died by being a 1:34 dupe, and boy did I get a lot of 1:34 dupes, 11 in fact, I might as well wear my 1:34 (12) like a badge of honor or something, you should NEVER dupe that many times on Aztec. About a week or two before I got 1:33, I had this run (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hz_aEwKJZI) which I think was 1:32 pace (!) but I simply didn't get the final upload off, and naturally I lived the rest of the big room. The 1:33 was pretty good overall, not much to complain about except for kind of a slow glass open. Also, shoutout to Canovah for getting 1:33 while in the hoard and NOT hoarding it :nesquik:. And shoutout to EC for being a complete TURNCOAT by SKIPPING 1:34 going straight from 1:35 to 1:33.
Spoiler
EC's 1:33 reaction btw
(https://i.imgur.com/pkHvLIe.jpg)
I used the song "Rhinestone Eyes" by Gorillaz for this run, the video is a nod to the fact that the music video was unfinished and was released only as storyboards, with a pencil filter put on some Aztec screencaps. I also edited the pauses to be faster so the time reveal at the end lines up with the song, and put some scrolling Discord screenshots of my 1:34 dupes. Not much else to say except that I somehow rendered it in a format that Vegas can't actually use so when it came time to compile my section I had to rerender it.
Dam SA 1:18 - Finally after battling my way through the treacherous Aztec grind I was greeted by a savior by the name of Dam SA. I knew I could get 1:18 somewhat easily, which is why I went for it immediately after a long grind like Aztec. 50 minutes into my first session, while I was practically just warming up, I suddenly get a completed run, I click past the endscreen and BAM 1:18, I don't think I got any 1:18 fails even. This tells me I can probably grind for 1:17 if I wanted, but I wanted 1:18 to be by opener, and 1:17 seems too strong to open my section.
The reason I wanted 1:18 to be first was because my idea for the video would take the form of the run being an MTV music video, I also figured the bumper I made at the start would follow the [k4] and Project 2020 tradition of having some sort of bumper between players. What better song to use in my MTV style video, than "Video Killed the Radio Star," the first video aired on MTV, and a song I just like a lot. The font I used for the title card is Kabel, which is the font MTV used for those title cards, and is also the font I used for my initials throughout the hoard. I figured I'd do a tongue-in-cheek reveal of me being in the hoard by using a clip of Pauli making fun of me for taking so long on 1:19 two years ago, speaking to me from the heavens to bless me with a 50 minute grind for 1:18. Now the VHS look was interesting as the way I got it was very jank. I took the edited video, put it on an SD card, put the SD card in my Nintendo Wii, connected the Wii to my VCR, played the video on the Wii and recorded it on the VCR, then played the tape and captured it with OBS. The tape I used was also very heavily used, pretty much all my PRs that were recorded on a VHS tape since S1 1:02 was using that tape, so it wasn't looking too hot, but it kind of added something to the look.
Belgium R 1:38 - Look guys it's an untied world record! I got an Everdrive for Christmas, and I knew that one of the first things I had to do was get Silvereye, the best GE ROM hack of all time winning many awards and earning roaring praise across the wider gaming community, most people seem to think it's better than GE even. Before I even got Silvereye, in fact, I got an "untied" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iIGrT_amPs) on Goldfinger console, but I was using the emulator ROM which makes the guards more accurate and I got boosted way more often than usual. Anyway, back to the superior game, Belgium is the fifth level, and I was stuck trying to figure out how to beat it for a long time before just watching BK's record, 1:44, and after beating the level, I just decided to go for the untied because BK takes it super safe, blowing up drones, slowing down, etc. After a bit I managed a 1:42 (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/701079374060847200/792177906628427776/20201225_185136.jpg) (no vid, just an endscreen pic), but not long after, I got a 1:38. Even though I played on Recruit, the Agent equivalent, it's actually very hard to live this level and you die a lot, mostly to the "Boss" that you don't actually have to kill but 9 times out of 10 he will shoot a rocket right into the stairs in front of him and in your way, which forces you to go through the explosion and tank damage, and on a level where you die a lot normally. When Dusky asked during the premiere how many open doors I get, my first thought was, "you can get open doors?" I also did a C-up mine throw which Dusky did not approve of. Actually the run was kinda cringe all the way through tbh. I actually have more Silvereye records that I didn't show, I showed this one for the holly jolly Christmas spirit, you can see the WRs for Silvereye on THE SHEET. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K_JGBKT88tCMuu3z14VptZ6iXLpVtpxrMn3InYe3vEg/edit?usp=sharing) BK actually was going to hoard his Hoth(in) 2 Recruit 0:50 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEzz5ca7ZYA) but I may or may not have accidentally beat it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSoH3OZdWA) I also wanna mention that I attempted to play through the game on Veteran difficulty. the 00 Agent equivalent, to unlock the bonus stages, which is very difficult and something BK hasn't actually done, he just used a GE save file to unlock them, but when I got to Hoth(in) 2 it turns out that on Veteran one of the objectives just doesn't complete for some reason, so the whole playthrough was mostly for naught and I used BK's save file to unlock the stages anyway.
The video shown before the actual run was a Sammo meme with "If You're Happy and You Know It" that I can up with and instantly started making because I loved the idea so much. When I was done I realized Flechr has a whole thing about clapping and I didn't reference it so I subtly snuck in a clip of him yelling "put down your fucking hands," and I edited it so it sounds like he's Sammo's neighbor yelling at him. The Christmas skit was actually filmed in mid-January, if you pay attention to the date of my laptop you can maybe see that it's certainly not 12/25/2020. I added a bunch of reminders on Google Calendar of all the days that aren't Christmas, you can read them all if you'd like, and I turn to open my gift. Originally I was gonna print out some sort of card with "CL UWR" on it but that's when I realized I didn't have a printer so I just wrote it in pencil, and then you see a dramatic reenactment of me getting my Everdrive for Christmas, accompanied by percussion to "All I Want For Christmas Is You" by Sammo. If I'm being honest I think I timed the sounds of the impacts to the songs pretty well.
B2 A 0:23 - Now this right here, this is the big one, the big boy time, a world record and a half, truly remarkable, as they say. For a very long time I've been kind of eyeing up this time, I felt like it's something I could get, but I never went for it until this hoard. This was actually my grind right after Dam SA 1:18 and Silvereye was just a meme that lasted like a day or two in the middle of this grind. Very quickly into my attempts I was getting 0:1 24s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6r_SODzoEU) but I never felt truly confident in my pace. That is, until I got both a confidence and disappointment boost with a 23 B fail (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjumXyVDakI), I thought this grind would end pretty soon after that, but it didn't, that 23 fail was over a month before I would actually get 23, and I had some very weird 24s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKnT1e1neSY) along the way. Even though this grind was technically longer than my Aztec SA grind, I still was enjoying it more, with boredom instead of anger, a good change if I do say so myself. The 23 was great, the start was kinda eh, my cell door at the start was a little off but the rest of the run was very clean, an insane key guard kill, a good boost, a great glass warp, and an actually kinda slow last warp later, I had 23 in my pocket. Very happy to have this time and kudos to ragequit for getting it after me, but he didn't know that :smirk:.
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/xT0mKeh.png)
We were very hot on WRs at this time, 12/15 of the most recent times as of January 13th were WRs (Randy's runs are out of order with the rest, he forgot to add them at first, and Xela's 3:06 wasn't even added to the list)
The video actually uses footage from Silvereye because it allows you to go outside of Bunker and explore the helipad, sounds fun right, I've always wanted to explore a helipad. The edit for this run was to turn and show a Wanted poster with BabyRage on it to signify my infant status. I animated the poster to line up with the angle of the wall through the use of trial and error, mostly error, the original version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftyWJp83DH8) looks weird because I didn't do it right, but I fixed it for the full video and it looks passable I guess. I kept the edit short so it can let the run speak for itself and also to line up with the music, the song being "Jailbreak" by Thin Lizzy which I used for hopefully obvious reasons.
Other things I want to mention:
The name "Amalgamates," as I've said, is referencing the fact that this hoard is basically just multiple hoards combining into one. The name, if I remember correctly, was suggested by BDown in a hoard-related meeting in December.
Oh my god! That trailer for the hoard looks so sick! It's so great I want to meet whoever made it and mildly complement them! Yeah okay fine I made the trailer. BDown suggested the idea of having some sort of timeline video with past hoards, and also suggested "The Race For Space" by Public Service Broadcasting as the background music. I hadn't actually edited anything at that point and I really liked his idea so I made a draft of the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMmQ-INjq1g) and everyone was on board with it. I didn't make a final version until the day before the announcement, which also ended up being a day earlier than the planned announcement day and I wasn't present for it.
Ok I'm talking about BDown a lot and how much help he was, but now I'm talking about me helping him :smirk:. Not really, but one night we were in VC and he was going for Archives 16, I tried finding timeloss in his runs but I decided to play Archives for a bit to see if I can get the epic speedbully (which he was very okay with me getting) and I got a 16 dupe and dedicated it to BDown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMhiPEYtUA0). The night after, he gets both 16 and Runway 22.
Big thanks to THE Dr. Doak for tweeting the Missing poster! (https://twitter.com/drdoak/status/1355685691267682307)
I did a face reveal in the Part 1 credits, I'm fine with people knowing what I look like, but I figured it would be cool for my face reveal to be at some kind of meet but that's not happening any time soon. I'll leave you all with this screenshot, courtesy of Flechr's Discord:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/CzhruKE.png)
Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0X6875CXq4) is an unused FNAF meme starring Marcus Stryker as the titular Freddy Fazbear. I couldn't find a place for this bit so I just didn't use it but here it is for you to enjoy or whatever else you do with memes.
I think I did a good job selling myself as not being in this hoard, as I'm pretty sure literally nobody predicted I was in it. Even when my runs started people thought it was Joey at first until the reveal, even though I'm objectively worse at Dam SA.
My intro, loosely based on the Cowboy Bebop intro and using the song from that opening, "Tank!" was, pretty evidently, what I spent the most time editing. It wasn't really lots of time I was just slacking on it because it wasn't a run video, but I am very happy with how it turned out and I'll say that's true for my whole section. Also, "I've never seen cowboy bebop" is a true statement, though I've been told it's pretty good, I might watch it idk.
I wanna give a special shoutout to Berg who was in the hoard but left at some point, we kinda forgot about him in the Special Thanks (whoops). His Runway Turbo 10 was originally going to be in this hoard, but he released it because he was worried Joris or someone would get it.
Thanks to all the Amalgamates for being, well, mates, throughout the course of the hoard. I was gonna do a section about everyone but this post is already too long and they would all pretty much be like "You were great, your vids were great, I loved hoarding with you." That's not to say the sentiment doesn't apply, because it does, I had a lot of fun doing this and being able to share it with the community, and I also don't want to take away stories that involve some of the other mates more than I that they might want to share in this thread. But special thanks to Pogo for somehow managing to see value in me joining the hoard :v.
*Post written while listening to Radio Matecorp