YPSILANTI, MI - Gamers Outreach founder Zach Wigal doesn't remember having mononucleosis, or mono, as a kid, but he can recall getting really good at Mortal Kombat.

That experience helped form the basis of a nonprofit the Saline native started in high school and the annual fundraiser Gamers for Giving, which recently raised a record $772,599 to provide young hospital patients with family-friendly video games and entertainment during stressful and sometimes painful hospital stays.

Around 1,500 video gamers lent their celebrity and social media during the 10th annual event April 28-29 at the Eastern Michigan University that raised enough money to build 220 video game kiosks that include an Xbox or PlayStation and video games like Minecraft or Zoo Tycoon.

"It's like the Jerry Lewis telethon for video gamers," Wigal said about Gamers for Giving. "These video gamers are our version of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin."

The funds included a match of $350,000 from PUBG Corp., the maker of video game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, with the rest of the proceeds stemming from ticket sales and donations from the video game community across the world who followed along with the event's live-streaming video and social media accounts.

"This is the most we've ever raised in ten years," said Wigal, adding that $315,000 was raised in 2017. "At the end of the day, we wanted Gamers for Giving to be a positive experience for gamers in the community."

One person took a bus, a plane and a train ride to get to Gamers for Giving in Ypsilanti from Mexico, just one example of its appeal internationally due to the charitable aspect. Online registration for the event sold out within two hours in January.

"It's wild to see the international support that's been swelling, and very, very humbling," he said. "The video game community really lends itself well to being involved with charitable causes because it is, by its nature, really connected."

In an interview with The Ann Arbor News Wednesday, May 2, Wigal said the nonprofit known as Gamers Outreach started out as video game tournaments with proceeds he and his friends raised going to charitable causes in the community.

"I remember a time when we were walking around local high school parking lots and putting flyers on people's windshields, probably skipping class, to promote our Halo tournament," Wigal said, laughing.

It soon became a partnership with C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, where members of the nonprofit realized hospital staff were having a hard time giving some patients access to bedside activities that encouraged socialization and well-being.

"We thought it would be fun to work with the hospital to create a portable video game kiosk to make sure that entertainment was easy to access," Wigal said.

The idea became Project GO (Gamers Outreach) Kart and today, more than 300 of them can be found in pediatric units at around 50 hospitals nationwide.

It has also spawned another program called Player Two, where video game enthusiasts can volunteer their time and go to hospitals where they will update the video game technology as well as play a round or two of Madden with young patients.

"For a kid, that's a huge deal," Wigal said. "Hospitals themselves have started directly reaching out to us for GO karts, and kids are engaging in fundraisers for fellow patients."

Gamers Outreach plans to expand their products to around 200 facilities this year, as Wigal oversees the process from the building of the karts in Texas to the manufacturing of parts in Michigan's Clinton Township.

"We were just a bunch of nerds who were passionate about video games but now we're engaging in the manufacturing process," Wigal said.

Healthcare professionals are now catching onto the idea of the positive power of video games, Wigal said, whether to incentivize treatment and therapy for young patients or to improve quality of life.

"A lot of hospitals and fundraising organizations concerned with treatment and research, which is priority, but there's not a lot of investment in quality of life or entertainment," Wigal said. "That's where we come in, as a nonprofit, and say we think this is valuable."

The biggest challenge facing Gamers Outreach is learning how to scale appropriately and addressing bottle necks when it comes to product manufacturing but Wigal said the nonprofit is hiring and growing its team to address those issues.

As a high school senior, he didn't dream that video games would one day become a full-time job or the nonprofit he started so he could play Halo for a good cause would become an internationally-known program.

"I've loved every minute spent working on it, and I love video games and the industry," Wigal said. "It's exciting to marry that with something that's improving other people's lives."