OCT's: Original Character Tournaments

About

An Original Character Tournament is an online artistic competition where an artist portrays their original characters fighting against an original character created another artist, with a group of judges ultimately deciding the superior submission. Submissions can be anything from narrative writing, to animation, the most common format being digital comics.

History

Endzone

On June 7th, 2007 Deviant Art user and webcomic artist Endling^[1] created a journal entry^[2] outlining an early form of the Original Character Tournament format. The proposal for the first OCT: Endzone was met with a very positive response, with 610 Artists submitted Original character audition pieces for the tournament. Out of the pool of entrants, 32 artists were chosen to compete.

Reception

After the success of Endlings Original Character Tournament, a slew of other OCTs began accepting entrants to compete in their own creative universes. The online OCT registry OCT Followers ^[3] has registered over 200 Original character tournaments, and Websites such as Entervoid ^[4] were for artists to pit their original characters against other those of other artists. Although the format differs for each individual tournament, most require a unique Character Reference sheet in order to introduce their character.

Notable Examples

Several popular characters have emerged from the OCT format, including Unknown Person's character: Climber^[5], and Zeurel's character: Spoiler ^[6]

External References

^[1] Deviantart – Endling

^[2] Deviantart – OC TOURNAMENT: ENDZONE, LAUNCH! 6-7-07

^[3] Deviantart – OCT Followers

^[4] Entervoid.com

^[5] Deviantart- Climber Reference Sheet, by Unknown Person

^[6] Deviantart- LoT: Spoiler Reference Sheet
by Zeurel