In the fall of 1988, my father (Scott Snelson) led a scrappy team of rural Utahns to win the Guinness World Record for the longest soccer match ever played: 75.5 continuous hours. The event has long sparkled in my family lore. An audacious endurance test marked by brutal conditions, sleep-deprived hallucinations, and, in the end, collective victory. The Soccerthon put our small town of Roy on the map and in the news. Though we’ve long thought the event went relatively undocumented, this past fall a six-hour stretch of VHS video footage mysteriously surfaced on the internet, featuring player interviews and local news reports alongside more intimate forms of family documentary. Upon discovering this footage in August of 2024, I reached out to game artist Wiley Wiggins, my collaborator on the project, who shares my interest in innovative art practices utilizing forgotten media histories, the play of familial narratives within video game structures (as featured in his forthcoming publication “Dungeon Mode”), and including an unlikely overlap in our interest in religious ethnography and our shared Mormon ancestry. The confluence of these events, and our long-standing conversations, initiated our proposed project currently in development: an experimental documentary and psychological horror sports game that simulates the family traumas and hallucinations that characterized a real-world 75.5-hour soccer match conducted in rural Utah from 8/8/88 to 8/11/88.

• D Snelson