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DreamHack Winter 2002
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! :-)"
must be weeping with joy
Anybody care to imagine the B.O. that's gotta be emanating from this place?
No? Me neither.
On the plus side, there can't be any shortage of munchies lying about this place.
This is the biggest fragfest outside of Afghanistan!
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I feel sorry for the guy who kicks over the wrong plug in that place. :-)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You bet. I hear these LAN parties usually have a decent internet connection. Since @Home is gonna leave me in the dark any minute now, I'd love to be anywhere else but here.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Jason.
Let me know when they have one in July...
The cake is a pie
All 7 women in the room have strategically placed laptops right next to the door, for quick exits.
The town that it is hosted in is flooded by melting snow from around the building.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
dreamhack is a DEMO party. For art, not for playing retarded videogames all night. It's
for hacking out that great 4k intro with the full
first level from decent. Or faking that multiple light source "phong" with a picture of your mate holding a coke can. Not for playing videogames.
I wish people would grab a clue. Gamerlamers used to get chastized or beat up for going to demoparties, sadly this isn't the case anymore.
I doubt i'll even bother ever going to asm if this is what they have become. There's no thrill in watching some dorks play videogames. There *is* a thrill in seeing the latest wizzbang effects on the screen and figuring out for yourself just how they worked so you can do that plus more in your next demo.
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:
/. effect.. we've got a 1Gbit uplink here (although how they got that to an exhibition center is beyond me).
:-).
:] 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.
1. We haven't noticed any
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
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)
And the brethren went away edified.
40 km ethernet cable.
15 km electical wiring.
6 000 chairs.
2 km tables.
1.5 Megawatts of power.
40 000 cans of Jolt cola.
And I though my 8 person Lan Party was hard to put together...
Thats seriously a lot of fucking jolt. Dear god. I mean really, holy fucking shit. Damn.
Any prizes for beating the 86 hour mark for gaming?
;)
Can't let Korea hold that forever
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
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
Do you think any of the thousands of geeks bother to shower?
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
If the roof fell in there wouldn't be a single broken hearted sweetheart back home.
Sex - Find It
All Real Programmers (TM) know Dr. Pepper is the shit when it comes down to separating the men from the boys.
Definitely integral to surviving those 35-hour debugging bugfest sprees armed with nothing more than a butter knife, some scotch tape and an MP3 player.
Those who emerge from that hell with six functional brain cells (or more) are theretofore respectfully acknowledged as members of the Order Of The Pepper Willies, bless our tender hearts.
Question is, when will events like this become real complace. I mean most of us that game online, have held our own little lan party's. Anywhere from 8 (your standard cheap ether-hub, and still okie on a 512k adsl modem) and 24, when you can manage a guild or clan meeting (which takes an age to organize). Games such as half-life and its many skins, probably wont be able to set them up. But with the likes of "Dark age of Camelot" Europe / US . Seeing so many users now, and ever expanding, with more and more servers, it can only be a matter of time till events become common place. Esp, if they offer prizes for either code or storyline.
--+> Life, is there any?
I guess the Swedes have a lot of time on their hands... to be able to host a 4 day slumberparty/advertisement for ASUS...
How does the fact that ASUS is using this for marketing diminish the event whatsoever? It's one thing to be cynical about marketing and "big business", but it's quite another to take that to the point that you fail to see the positives when you've overblown the negativity.
If anyone at the DreamHack LAN party is reading this, I dare you to degauss your monitor in the middle of a huge game. A guaranteed good time!
I'm here, and everything rocks,execept that the whole thing is over in about 4 hours :/
Ring brother, ring for me | Ring the bells of hope and faith
Ring for my damnation | I am at the gallows end
you know I'll never get slashdot moderation. insightful for this?? funny yes, insightful? oh well regardless I'd hate to be part of the cleanup crew
"In related news stocks in lysol and charmin skyrocket, also the nerd population in sweden has unexpectedly dropped dramaticly."
you know if this did happen it'd be kinda like that episode of south park where everyone decided to hold their farts and people started exploding.
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.
RIP Mekka. We will miss you. Apparently the organizers had some disputes they couldn't resolve. However, if you missed Dreamhack, Breakpoint looks like it's going to be the party to go to, with many of the organizers from mekka and other demoparties. (Note: FPS people need not apply - no gaming allowed, no warez allowed. sorry.) Hope to see you there!
--joshua
They are about to cut the network (DH2002 is almost over), so I answer a few of this questions briefly:
:-(
:-)
>how much did you pay to go to this?
500 SEK, about 55 US$
>do you live there or did you travel to go to it?
People live here during the event, but they come from all over Sweden.
>whats the most popular game being played there?
Counter-Strike
Q3A and Warcraft 3 are other popular choices.
>whats on the big screen?
Info, finals from game compos, demoscene stuff and other fun stuff
Ring brother, ring for me | Ring the bells of hope and faith
Ring for my damnation | I am at the gallows end
I can only welcome the idea, it seems the demoscene is once again on the edge of a major change in the public they are reaching.
There was a time when scene-ing was a BBS-only thing, and parties were small obscure events happening in garages and local youth centers. Since the internet, demo parties have, together with LAN parties (and usually it's the same event anyway), grown to visitor numbers beyond the domestic range. For organisers it's getting more and more difficult to support such a load without sacrificing some of the I-know-you atmosphere that used to be present on these cosy events. Since a few years, demos (and lan parties) have been striving to entertain the general public, not just the underground scene. I think this is a good thing, but I also miss the sense of obscurity that stemmed from the hack and crack era, of which it was initially a subculture.
For more news and references on these parties and the content they put out, see Scene.org
ciao,
a0a
With great power comes great electricity bills.