On April 4th, 2016, the speedrunning community suffered a terrible loss when Aaron 'Everhate' Mayfield, a lifelong gamer from Oklahoma in the United States, unexpectedly passed away. Everhate was a speedrunner of the NES Dragon Warrior series and multiple SNES RPGs, along with a passionate supporter of countless NES/SNES speedrunners, and will be missed greatly by many people. More information on Everhate's passing is available at http://pastebin.com/RW3XysBC, and a memorial fund to assist his family has been established at https://www.gofundme.com/aaronjm.

Soul Blazer was Everhate's first speedgame, and he put many hours not only into routing and attempts at it, but also into making speedrun tutorials and encouraging others to play this classic SNES RPG. To bid a fond farewell to our friend, the SNES Final Fantasy Relay/tournaments admin team (catastrophic4, the_roth, eLmaGus, Neerrm, and puwexil) is going to hold an open-entry Soul Blazer race on Sunday, April 17th, starting at 4PM EDT (GMT-4). The 3 active Soul Blazer speedrunners (StingerPA, Le_Hulk, and Jenja23) will be restreamed at http://twitch.tv/rpglimitbreak with commentary by Osey889 and Driscollad; but anyone and everyone is welcome to join the race and honor Everhate's memory by playing one of his favorite games. SpeedRunsLive will be used to start the race, though not required to participate - feel free to play along even if you don't stream or want to begin earlier or later than 4PM EDT.

Rules:

You can either play on SNES console (Soul Blazer was unfortunately never released on Wii VC) or an SRL-approved emulator (any one except for ZSNES or SNES9x 1.4x).

Timing will be from file select (when you press B on a blank file to start the game) until the last hit on Deathtoll (when he starts to explode).

The SRL race will be on the English NTSC version (Soul Blazer). The Japanese version (Soul Blader) is significantly faster due to text speed and boss design differences, and isn't fair competition.

Everhate made a great video tutorial for the Soul Blazer speedrun, and StingerPA has made a text guide - using either of those, anyone should be able to finish the game in 4-5 hours or less with minimal practice. If you're not able to join the race but still want to participate, then stop by http://twitch.tv/rpglimitbreak, watch the race restream, and share your memories of Everhate and his contributions to speedgaming.

Soul Blazer Video Tutorial: https://www.twitch.tv/everhate/v/47968582

Soul Blazer Text Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18jwbieRoAvE2bszRm5jxV98JDxEUmjAOykxBKiB_0kw