Victory for Splash Damage at the OneBigGame football tournament!

May 23, 2023

If you’ve been following us for the past few years, you’ll know that there are two things we’re big fans of: football, and supporting amazing charities.

So, when we heard that Rare and Microsoft were putting together a football tournament to raise money for SpecialEffect, we jumped at the chance to participate.

That football tournament was One Big Game: A 24-hour marathon involving 24 teams from across the UK games industry, held at St George’s Park (the home of all 23 of England’s national football teams) and streamed live on Twitch.

As you can imagine, we were more than a little excited about the entire affair. So, we took along our video team to capture the day:

On the day

Our match kicked off at 10:45am, so we had to leave Splash Damage HQ at the bleary-eyed time of 6am. However, as the coach pulled into St George’s Park and we saw the Three Lions badge, any tiredness was replaced with sheer excitement.

Sunny put it best when he said “Arriving at St George’s Park was genuinely like a childhood dream come true, seeing the England badge and all of the pictures of the national team was surreal.”

Sam echoed this, saying “Knowing we were going to play on the same pitch where the England national team train was amazing”.

That said, the size was a bit of a shock! “It felt about 80 times bigger than the normal 5 or 7-aside pitches we play on” according to Rachael.

She said “I’m pretty sure everyone was knackered after 5 minutes of running (I know I was!) and I’m surprised we all made it to the end of the match intact… mostly!”

Our opponents were Playtonic, who greeted us with a resounding chorus of boos. Their plan to psych us out backfired though, and it actually got the whole team ready to go!

The end result

Pre-match banter aside, Playtonic were true sportsmen and women and an excellent team to play against. That didn’t stop us from smashing our way to a 10-1 victory, though! But, everyone was there for a good cause so we’ve promised them a rematch!

The teams, their supporters and the Twitch viewers raised a whopping £29,000 for Special Effect. We’re so glad that we got to be a part of it.

But to finish off our recap, we’ll leave you with Sunny’s post-match comments:

“Going into it there were some nerves on how well we’d play against Playtonic, not knowing their squad. But, we came together as a team and came out on top. It was a remarkable rollercoaster of emotions.”

Now that quote wouldn’t sound out of place on Match of the Day!

Want to join us on the pitch? We’re hiring!