Although I may have not participated and was VERY late because I joined in September, I’ll surely miss this.
6 Likes
Good luck to both contestants! I put my vote on Requite.
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wait how did i actually get 2 voters 
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It’s a close vote… Somehow.
Everyone vote for the demo! (Because it would be funny if it wins, no offence)
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Nice voting poll!
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FINAL DAY TO VOTE FOR THE CK5 SUBMISSIONS!
(also, I only then jst realized that this poll is meant to close on Valentines Day, oh well)
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Today is 02/14/2026 EST!!! With that being said, the voting booth has officially been closed! I will now begin finalizing the results post, expect it to be released sometime next week.
Oh, right, this reminds me, I still have the final CK series goodbye letter to release. So far, I just need to proofread the post one final time. I’m probably going to drop the behemoth of the post on 02/15/2026 EST. Of course, this can vary based on the approval times.
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lol i can’t believe it was actually close 
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Welp, guess Ima fulfill my promise here and now. It is currently 02/15/2026 EST as I am posting this, so hopefully the mods approve it by the end of the day or something like that.
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Behold, The CK Series Goodbye Letter or however you want to call it.
The Letter Itself (WARNING: LONG TEXT AHEAD)
Dear The Forums
Today is some day in the month of February of the year 2026.
It’s been a while since the qualifiers that occurred at the start of August 2025. Guess we’re officially at the end of CK5. I started this 5th chapter in August of 2025. The end of an era is approaching. As you can see, children, we are witnessing the last breaths of the journey. This also applies to the entire CK series in general. I kinda thought that this was common knowledge already, but I think now is a good time to hang up the host career stuff on the Makecode Forums.
One may ask me, “Oh, Taser, what shall you do after the end of the CK5, after most of your forum career was hosting competitions?” See, I am an old man (I’m not even an adult yet, but you get the point) on the forums. Yessir, indeed I am. Now, on that note. The answer is, I don’t know either, I don’t necessarily have a clear road of things. I did not plan too far. Whether I’ll start developing games myself or just leave the forums is TBD at the moment.
Nevertheless, I want to clear things up. CK1 was not necessarily the original unofficial game jam on the forums. When I joined the forums, there already existed other unofficially-hosted competitions like The Coding Tourney (see link below for that competition). Those many competitions played a pretty vital role in inspiring me to make my own unofficial game jam, the ones that y’all probably know as the Coder King (typically abbreviated to “CK”) series.
https://forum.makecode.com/t/coding-tourney/8568?u=taser
Unfortunately, to tell you the truth, circumstances did not fare too well for those preceding competitions; they struggled with inactive users, multiple life issues, and a great wave of forfeitures. As a result, they never got the proper opportunities to reach their primes or the finals at all. A lot of them became abandoned projects. In the case of the Coding Tourney, I only saw a few games actually submitted, and there were meant to be 32 contestants competing in total.
I did notice all of this before beginning the CK series. However, I didn’t take it too hard. Back then, during the summer of 2022 (when CK1 started), I was extremely prideful, arrogantly thinking that my competition would be an exception compared to everything else that came before. I should also say that I had little to no experience in leadership, hosting competitions, or anything of that matter when I first made the CK1 topic. But that wasn’t much of a problem in my eyes a few years back.
All of that did not bode well. It all came to bite me in the butt within a small time frame. When CK1 first started, I had 10 users willing to compete (following the nomination process), but it was not too long before half of them dropped out due to issues happening in the real world, and I had only 5 users to compete in a jiffy. Cutting the length and structure of my competition much shorter than I had intended it to be. I was in a dark place, wondering if my competition would join the graveyards.
But I do not think that those remaining 5 competing users in CK1 felt the same way as me. They were not doomers, but they were people willing to take action in the competition and kept on going, even with all the extensions and unfortunate life circumstances. You would eventually have realized that it was the contestants who made up the outcome of competitions. I would think that I have hit the jackpot. To this day, I am extremely grateful to those users; they all played a key and vital role in helping me bring my competition to success. They were the true saviors.
After CK1 ended, I decided that I wanted to take the unofficial game jam competition even further, resulting in the creation of CK2, CK3, and beyond. I will not be so arrogant as to say that I was the perfect host that the forums all wanted. Heck. There are competition hosts that are better than I, such as @Unique with his UAT series. In the early CK series, I posted a ton of satire and filler, and that made my competition look like some child’s play. I also made several severe leadership mistakes, leading to me getting into some big trouble and almost destroying my own competitions as a result, for instance 
.
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(context for image above: I started a now-deleted diagnostic challenge in CK2, but I went way too harsh with the contestants, trying to force them to make full effort games in a limited and unexpected time frame. As a result, many dropped out, and I spent the next month or so trying to recruit more contestants. The post that you see above this context stuff is essentially an apology from my end for my failure as a host.)
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And another one…
(context for this other image above: I ended up eliminating notable user @randomuser in CK1’s first challenge due to her game only being approved just slightly after the deadline had passed. I told her not to worry about it, but I still eliminated her regardless. Looking at it now, I swear I did not know what I was thinking when I posted the results initially, and I ended up apologizing to her before fixing the results. This was probably the first scandal that I ever faced as a host, but we are on good terms now.)
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Now that one has taken a look at those 2 screenshots above and their embedded contexts. It all seems quite embarrassing, don’t you think? This is kind of what I meant by the entire CK series forwarding Taser character development in another previous (text wall) post that should be linked below this paragraph. The list of scandals that I ended up getting put through during the CK series goes on and on. Really, I kind of came to terms with that idea quite some time ago.
https://forum.makecode.com/t/coder-king-5-end-of-an-era/37293/54?u=taser
To go back to the process of hosting all those competitions, I will say with fine observations that the roads only got bumpier as each chapter passed. More forfeits, more extensions, it felt like an uphill battle each and every time I hosted a competition. Heck, each CK3 and CK4 round took at least a month due to multiple extensions having to be given out. But history was achieved on the forums, and I (along with many other users) got to see so much incredible work from fellow Makecoders. I’ll be taking those memories to the grave, thank you very much.
Oh, right, here is the list of all the champions crowned so far. I owe them all a ton for helping me bring all CK installments to success, so I figured that I should give them all a shoutout in this.
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@danger_kitty (the first ever Makecoder to win 2 official game jams, the first CK champion, creator of Red-Line and Three Brave Cats 2, a true legend in the Makecode community)
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@Brohann (the champion of CodeNinjas game jam, created a 3d rendering extension, a 2-time CK contestant, without a doubt one of the most technically skilled programmers on the forums)
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@InvalidProject (the 3rd ever Makecoder to win 2 official game jams, the winner of the probably-most-competitive CK chapter, and the GOAT music composer on the forums)
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@randomuser (the president of Makecode 2 years in a row, top one on the all-time leaderboard, definitely the most dedicated user I’ve ever seen on the forums)
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TBD
To emphasize just how much importance CK has had to my forum life for the 239847923578957th time, I rechecked my own profile some time ago. Turns out over 4 years have passed since I joined the forums, 3 out of those 4 years have been spent on the hosting part of things. From August 2022 to right now. As a result, I kinda feel like most forum members just remember me as the guy who hosted over 4 coding competitions.
This reminds me, the competition series was never meant to last as long as it has right now. It was initially supposed to end when I had finished hosting CK3. Just over 2 years since I started CK1. However, CK4 and CK5 were added to my list of topics due to the majority of the MakeCode community begging me to continue the series. I made the poll in CK3 to determine whether or not I should create even more sequels. However, I will not be doing the same for CK5.
For years, I have sought validation from other people, sort of like those people on Wall Street who seek to become millionaires and swim in dollar bills. For years, in other communities across the internet, I remained a loner who was never noticed, let alone respected, by many people. I did not like that. In the MakeCode forums, I thought that the CK series would be able to help me achieve big dividends, the things that I had always desired on the internet. Sure, it was all successful. But… I think I had my fill, my contributions all done to the fullest. This time, I want to take matters into my own hands.
I want to hammer this idea in for the community for the (hopefully) final time now. This is indeed the End of an Era, as the name of this topic states. It ain’t as clickbaity as you think. After I post the final results and declare the champion for CK5, there will be no more CK installments. I do not intend to make a CK6; I will never intend to make a CK6. I do not wish for any other person to continue the CK series with CK6 and beyond. This ain’t based on legal means, in which I would take someone to court for damages, more like an ethical one. If someone wishes to make their own competition, feel free to do so.
Everything has run its course. I’ve been exhaustively playing the role of competition host for a long time. I want to close this series off once and for all and move on to even bigger and epic things. I do not know if there will be anyone on the forums who has plans to make a (separate from the CK series, of course) competition themselves, but I do think that they can thrive, and perhaps move on to even bigger and epic things as well.
I do not have any regrets now.
Thanks for sticking with me for the last 3 years.
It’s been an honor.
- Dr. Taser
12 Likes
I’ve said it many, many times, but Coder King is the reason I truly joined MakeCode’s community in the first place and led me to create my first ever public game on the forum. Without these competitions, I would’ve never thought of sharing my games or chatting beyond bug fixes, so thank you : - )
Also…
Pre-nice randomuser
I’m so sorry with how agressive I was back then! We were both young and arrogant apparentely 
I’m glad to see how much everyone in the competitions have grown (both in programming and otherwise) over the course of these competitions!
Your events will be missed, but I’m so excited to see what you move on to next! 
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