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DreamHack Winter 2002

Posted by michael on from the i-dream-of-genie dept.

JJC writes "DreamHack, a huge LAN party, is taking place this weekend in Sweden. Here's some information in English and a daily report from sponsors ASUS. This and this ought to give you an idea of the scale of the thing. Here's the obligatory webcam and their Internet bandwidth graph. It's a massively impressive event, wish I was there! :-)"

5 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Higher resolution image by Tack · · Score: 5, Informative
    A higher resolution version of that picture is available here. There's probably around 1000 people in that one picture. Wow.

    Jason.

  2. An Inside perspective :-) by iolaire_in_swe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi all, I'm sitting in the picture that's linked in the little article.. and it's cool. I recently moved to sweden from the UK (where we have nothing on this scale). A little info:

    1. We haven't noticed any /. effect.. we've got a 1Gbit uplink here (although how they got that to an exhibition center is beyond me).
    2. Wintertime is a GOOD TIME for this sort of thing - it's 27C (80F) here just now. The other big swedish LAN (Remedy) is held in the summer, and it's a real sweatfest by comparison.
    3. Yes, there is a bit of a discrepancy in gender... there are about 20 girls here, out of the 4500 people here (luckily I happen to be going out with one of them :-).
    4. The most popular game here is Counterstrike, the half-life mod. the main tourney is 5v5, 128(!) teams. Q3 is also popular. There's also a history of demos here, and we've seen (and heard)some very cool stuff on the big screen. Microsoft is also here with some Xboxes - and a competition to win them (played on the machines themselves).
    5. You can buy Jolt Cola by the 24 pack slab :] These people know who they are dealing with it seems - very popular. There's also a smattering of hamburger/hot dog/sandwich places around the halls.

    All in all, I'm having a fine time - and so are most other people. Apart from some horror stories with DOA machines, it's all going splendidly.

    You're all welcome to come say hi on IRC - irc.quakenet.org #dreamhack has about 700 of us.

    iolaire (Qnet oper, gamer, blah blah)

  3. Re:NOT a lan party you fucks. by W2k · · Score: 5, Informative

    It may have been a demo party. Once. Today, those art/animation/demo compos are merely a bit of a distraction from the gaming, although some people (obviously) come for the demos rather than for the gaming. Still, they're quite obviously in minority, and I for one don't care. If they want to spend four days in front of their C compilers, let them.

    But hey, do tell me, if we're only supposed to be programming, why do we have a 1 GBIT Internet connection? Why is Microsoft here hosting Counter-Strike servers? Obviously, neither is neccessary for exchanging 64 kBit demos. The DH Crew are the ones organizing, so they decide what kind of party DreamHack is, at least officially. From the looks of things, they don't agree with you.

    I don't know if we here at DreamHack have the pleasure of having you among us, but if we do, please stand up on your chair and shout your opinion. There are ~4 999 "gamerlamers" around you, it'll be a blast.

    --
    Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
  4. The Gathering by cstrommen · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the curious, there's also a similar event once a year (easter) in Norway. The event is called The Gathering, and had almost 5000 participants last year (not including the massive stab etc etc). For more information visit http://www.gathering.org

    --

    --
    \ Christian A Strømmen

  5. Live feed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm one of the 5000 participants here on Dreamhack and it's a blast. There have been lots of tournaments, and some events that you perhaps wouldn't have expected. For example there has been a Mr Paperbag competition, where participants have been dressing up in nothing more then small paper bags. ATM there's a stand up comedy competition and for a couple of hours ago there was a snowball war arranged outside. There's been all kinds of companies giving away free stuff like t-shirts and games. M$ has even given away a couple of Windows XP cd-roms. =D

    It seems like some of the readers here believe its main goal is to make a flash demo for ASUS, and well, I can tell you that that's far from the truth. I would estimate that there are 80%-90% gamers here, and I would be surprised if it turns out that even 1% participates in creating a flash demo for ASUS.

    If you take a look around you would probably guess that M$ has a big part in financing this event. There's a game corner where you can try different X-box games for free and M$ has dragged a bid Unisys server down here. There's even been an attempt to make an unofficial world record in max CS gamers hosted by the Unisys server.

    A pic of the server can be found here.

    O well, back to the fun, there's something going on at the scene again.