I am obsessed with entering competitions, and I’ve won quite a few by now (I got free tickets to the same music festival seven years in a row due to my dedication). I love hearing stories of what others win and how they use their winnings.
Scholarship. When I was still in school.
Around 1981 or 82, I was about 12 years old and the local college radio station had a call-in for identifying snips of popular songs at the time. Best I can recall, it was Girls by Dwight Twilly, Let the Music Play by Shannon, and I think there were 3 others but I can’t remember what they were. The prize was a discount coupon to the local pizza place.
When the internet was still young I entered an online drawing to win a vacation on a travel website. I never really thought much of it. One day I decided to answer the phone even though we got lots of telemarketers. The woman was from the travel company and said I’d won a rafting trip in CO and that this had been their third and final attempt to reach me. It was totally legit, they paid for the flight, rafting trip and rental car. Due to low river levels the trip was moved to the San Juan river in UT though. It was an awesome trip. We even paid some extra to keep the rental car longer to add some extra sightseeing days to the trip.
I won an Xbox 360 a long time ago from a Coca Cola competition. You had to use codes from the bottle caps and then quickly answer some quiz questions correctly. But you had unlimited tries. So I just kept clicking random answers quickly until I got all questions right at a ridiculously low time.
Good times. Borrowed Guitar Hero, LA Noire, Batman Arkham Asylum and Red Dead Redemption at the library, had a blast.
I won a geolocation game from Rita’s and got a year of free Italian Ices. Every day during March they gave out a geolocation and you had a certain amount of time to find them to win. The first few days i missed the time limit. A couple times i was second. After a week or so i noticed a general pattern and started closer to the part of town i thought they would be. The day i won i was in the parking lot of the stadium where they were and watched them setting up. as soon as they sent out the geolocation i walked up and claimed my prize.
How did the prize work? Could you just waltz up and get free ices whenever you wanted?
They gave me a stack of free ice coupons (365)
That sounds delicious and also dangerous.
We are a family of 6, and I gave some away to friends and some unhoused people. My van leaked and the last 100 or so got wet and fused into a single coupon. I took it into the store and they took them all and gave me two 5 gallon buckets.
Edit: it was two 2.5 gallon buckets, for a total of 5 gallons of ice.
On my 18th birthday I bought 2 scratch lottery tickets, and doubled my money (20EUR spend, 40EUR return). Never played since. I beat the system 😎
I won The Game.
I believe you all lost.
You can’t possibly win the game
Eh, caught that, did you?
About twenty iPods.
Walkers, a snack company, was running a contest where you could enter a draw every ten minutes, 24 hours a day, to win an iPod. They also had a website where you could get an entry code without buying anything. I was one of the few people to have unlimited texts and a phone controllable by Bluetooth at the time, so I ran a script to just spam the free entry codes. Somehow they never cottoned on.
I already won the lottery. Born in the US of A baby!
RemindMe! 4 years
I’ve Been Involved In A Number Of Cults, Both As A Leader And A Follower. You Have More Fun As A Follower. But You Make More Money As A Leader.
His name? Creed Bratton.
F’n fruitbasket when I was about 10. Nothing after that. Although I don’t usually participate.
I’ve personally never won anything. I’ve entered maybe 1 or 2 of those contests yt people I watch/used to watch did where you go to the link and click on all the social media junk in hopes of winning a console, but never did win anything.
But a real long time ago my brother did win some contest. I think it was a radio contest but I don’t remember nor care much about it. Won some free martial arts lessons (probably just karate but I don’t remember). I think it was maybe 1-2 of them or something else as a promotion progresses something. I don’t fully remember because this was well over a decade ago.
I won a poetry competition when I was 15, but submitted the poem for my little bro. He ended up winning, getting in the local paper, getting published in a book, meeting a big celebrity for a photo etc.
Never won any award with my own two books, which I spent a lot more time on!
nothing lifechanging and not much is memorable. Only thing I can remember actually is a rocking chair. I do not enter things very often.
Just some minor nonsense. But all of it yields a fun memory.
I won a hat from a Wario Ware (Wii) tournament at my country’s biggest nerd-convention circa 2009. Got like a 15 minigame lead on the second place too.
I won a(n imported, we’re brazilian, these were never published here) copy of a My Little Pony Comic Omnibus from a giveaway at an MLP forum I participated in some 10 years ago. I never read the physical comic, it just sits untouched at my shelf. I just read the pirated .cbr
A few months later my SO won a Hot Topic Vinyl Figure of Princess Luna (also imported) from another giveaway at the same forum, and gifted it to me.
When I was a kid we won second in a general mills national contest for “a treasure chest of games.” They sent us a cardboard board with plastic pieces and like 4 games on it. Someone sued based on the commercial, and we got some cereal coupons.
Many years later, I won like 3rd in a Mountain Dew cap contest. They actually sent me the snow board - no binding or anything, but Mountain Dew has integrity.
