Hey everyone, it’s… been a minute.

Before we begin, I would like to apologize for the severe delay in giving you an update on how things are going behind the scenes; many of us have been very busy dealing with things beyond SHC, and time has not exactly been on the side of any of the staff that would be able to accurately summarize the state of affairs with SHC, which is why this is being written and posted in the middle of the night on a Thursday rather than a more optimal time.

To get the main point of this update out of the way, we have to delay the contest by a pretty substantial amount. The main reason for this is because, unfortunately, our main site developer Cinossu’s laptop experienced a catastrophic failure over about two weeks ago, and he is still in the process of procuring a new system so he can resume bringing the website up-to-date with the information and systems we revealed in the announcement back in late June. This has, unfortunately, thrown a spanner in the works and, we are left with no choice but to delay the contest. Here are the new target dates for everything:

Submissions Open: September 20th, 2026
End of Submission Period: September 30th, 2026
Beginning of Contest Period: October 24th, 2026
Ending of Voting Period: October 31st, 2026

We are hopeful that we won’t have to push this any further into overlapping with the holiday season and the supposed “final” release date of GTA VI, both of which you can bet your ass would really screw with media panel coverage and many attendees' ability to play and vote on entries in the allotted timeframe. We’ll keep you all posted on this.

Speaking of media panel coverage… I do think we at least owe you an update on what the status of our solution is for featuring guest creators via the official tag that we’re introducing this year. After further discussion and research, we believe we have figured out a way to feature guests automatically instead of needing to manually curate everything… but the bad news is that we *might* only be able to do this for livestreams hosted on Twitch, as YouTube’s Livestream API is nigh indistinguishable from a pile of rubbish. We’re still looking into a practical way to extend this to both platforms, but for anyone who is planning on streaming as a guest under the tag system this year, we would recommend being prepared to either use Twitch *or* a solution like Restream to broadcast to both platforms.

Lastly, I want to provide an updated list of Judges for each category ahead of the website update, something that we omitted from the text announcement and video. We were hoping to see more applicants for the 3D Judging body, but alas, there’s been little movement on that front. Here are the members of this year’s Judging body:

ROM Hack Category Judges:
Naoto (Head Judge), KGL (Head Judge), LatteLions (f.k.a. JamaDere), joshyflip, Ravenfreak, ScarlyNight, Scrap Sorra, SunkythePootis, SSF1991

Modern 2D Category Judges:
Leonx254 (Head Judge), LatteLions (Head Judge), Balibali, joshyflip, LunarCryptik, MiaCDi, ScarlyNight, SSF1991

3D Category Judges:
SSF1991 (Head Judge), Halfheart (Interim Head Judge), Sewer56 (Interim Head Judge), SpeepsHighway (Interim Head Judge), AdelQ (Newcomer)

And with that, I believe that’s everything we have to share for the time being. As things pick back up again and we get a clearer picture of where things are with bringing the website up to date, we’ll share more information; we just didn’t want to leave you guys on read for any longer. The good news is, if you didn’t think you were going to make the deadline before, you’ve got some more time now. Godspeed.