I travelled to Jönköping, Sweden, for the weekend. I’m still there actually but DreamHack Winter 2009, the reason I came here, is over now. The festival was held from Thursday to Sunday (today) morning. It gathered about 20 000 gamers, geeks, nerdz, whatever you wanna call us. Half brought their PC’s and plugged them to the massive network and 40 GB Internet connection.
I was told they could provide access to 2 billion people with that kind of bandwidth. Why don’t they go provide it to all of Africa then and make the world a better place where we can all live happily everafter, you ask? I don’t know and I will not investigate… But that’d for sure make for a nice destination come next year! No more cold weather and night falling at 4 in the afternoon at least.
Anyway, I had an AM4ZIN9 time at DreamHack Winter ‘09, here’s why…
DreamHack is a made for gamers city built for 4 days over 3 halls with a 40 GB internet connection. Last time they counted, it housed 20 000 souls.
The first guys I ran into at DreamHack are hip hop.
Big screens, big mousepads, custom boxes.
The Piratepartiet is the 3rd party in size in Sweden. And they have 2 elected members at the EU parliement. And they drive a Mercedes. More about them
The mTw.dk team is from Denmark and they’re 5 of the best CS players you’ll ever see in picture.
That’s Apollo, a very talented RTS player from the UK. We worked together before online, but had never met. I sat next to him here at DreamHack without an idea of who he was. It’s only after chatting for a couple minutes that we realized we knew each other. spoooky
I love Swedes, but… they call that bread?!
Starsky & Hutch in Russian – without Hutch
Free stuff!
Practical tip #454345: the day I build a city for 20 000 people, plan for more than 1 cash machine.
Now you don’t see them…
… NOW YOU DO!!!
yay, Street Fighters!
Laugh now, but one day he’ll be in charge.
We’re in DreamArena, the room where big tournament matches are played. Control screens galore.
Counter-Strike final in the DreamArena, the Swedish mYm faced the Danish mTw.dk. Told ya they were good! And no it wasn’t a Scandinavian only tournament. There were teams from all over Europe, even the US. It’s just that these guys from the North dominate most of the time. The Swedes ended up winning in front of a crowd of 1 200 screaming… Swedes. Collective happinness rulez.
These two guys look like regular geeks?… They’re not. Raf to the left, Thomas to the right, made DreamHack tournaments, litterally. Running all around the place for 4 days, setting up servers, handling angry competitors, bugs, cheaters, crappy PC’s and servers, etc. See, it’s so much work the guy couldn’t even get off the phone the time for a pic. To sum things up: in order to get the final at DreamArena (above picture), you need people working their ass off to exhaustion with little to 0 recognition. Here’s some ~
These two guys look like regular geeks?… They are.
Hall D, thousands of computers. (and you only see half of them)
DreamHack, where Moscow meet Dallas.
Keyboard hero
Hall B, Thousands of computers. (and you only see half of them)
Pirates!
Two guys are crazy enough to run DreamHack: props to Robert (that’s him right here) and David.
Now, THAT is bread.
Thanks for sharing the photos! I bet it was quite the experience.
And don’t forget to bring back good souvenirs, since you don’t have high quality bread in paris for sure.
Regular geeks don’t wear shorts and summer shoes in a swedish November.
I thought every guys in this area were geeks ! You have to be proud to be a geek too incolas !
indeed, what can you do? what about we start an event called Geek Pride? It would have as many women in it as the Gay Pride…
and, XTC, 10 000 computers running 3D games make for good heating :)
btw, where is the goodgame team ?
huh? it’s closed?!
Hey thanks incolas for this review, it reminded me the time we organize that kind of event, not so huge but ~1000 gamers was a good score !
No time to sleep during at least one week before the event.
Do you know what is the budget for this event ?
Oh, Gootecks ! Huge event. Thx for this cool report.
djul, I don’t have a clue about the budget…
Thx for sharing! It should be a great mess to organise that kind of event!
Did you eat any sweety fish with you bread for breakfast??
huh? no!
lots of other unusual stuff for a breakfast, but not that