QuakeCon 2010, come and gone

Crowds gather to watch the Intel Masters Finals in the Grand Ballroom.

QuakeCon 2010 was one hell of an event, I will tell you that much. I’m probably going to curl into a ball and seclude myself from the outside world when I get back to San Francisco tonight. I can honestly say that, in my 22 years on this planet, I have never worked so intensely, slept so little, and partied so hard all at once.

It was an incredible experience meeting so many new people, reconvening with all my old friends, and just getting shit accomplished  on a massive scale — but it wasn’t perfect by any means. If you were attempting to follow the action all weekend, you don’t need to be reminded of the technical issues that plagued QuakeCon’s internal network, or the spinning logo of doom. The bottom line for myself as well as Quake Live TV as an organization, is that this year’s event was a HUGE learning experience filled with ups and downs, drama and intrigue, and a whole lot of fragging in between. I believe that, in the end analysis, we put on an excellent show and had the opportunity… no, we had the privilege to showcase some of the best Quake action in the known universe.

So it was an event of mixed feelings. Even though it was a ridiculously sweet opportunity to be able to act as the main broadcasters at QuakeCon, I, for one, would have loved to work with Lo3 and QuadV again this year – it’s been bitter-sweet from the very beginning. On one hand, we got to broadcast the best CTF and Duel matches I have seen [maybe ever]; on the other, we weren’t able put out nearly as much content as we had hoped and thus got trolled to a dizzying extent. With only two weeks of notice to prepare, the last 12 days or so have been a literal cluster-fuck for many individuals from QLTV.

Enough negativity though, let’s talk about the positives! A very special aspect of this year’s event was the splash that our content made. When I’ve talked to djWHEAT or Slasher about the eSports industry in general, the topic of ‘what’s the the best and most immediate ways for eSports to grow’ is frequent. I believe that the holy grail for eSports is to get main-stream gaming sites (such as IGN, 1UP, Kotaku, Destructoid, or Gamespot) to get on board with coverage of the major pro-gaming events. This has already happened with the fighting game community (see: G4tv’s coverage of EVO2010), but the major North American FPS and RTS communities have g0tten no such love — which is why I can’t express how ecstatic I am that our content was syndicated on both QuakeLive.com AND Gamespot.com for the majority of the tournament! Not only that, but the lovely Bethesda PR team helped us get news stories out to major gaming blogs across the intertubes.  Gamespot was nothing but a pleasure to work with, and I hope they continue to feature eSports content in the future. For the first time in my short career as an eSports promoter, I have worked on a meaningful project which has reached outside of the hardcore community and grabbed the attention of Joe “Average” Gamer. FUCK.YES.

Even with notable players such as Av3k, noctis, fazz, griffin, k1llsen, and additionally many of the EU CTF teams absent, the competition was insanely fierce. From rapha‘s dethroning by the underdog stermy, to whaz‘s game-saving rail on Troubled Waters (see: HOLY… Poop nuggets, FFFUUU) and kgb‘s game loosing medkit fail, to DanDaKing‘s rise to fame, to Cypher‘s brilliant aim giving him the edge on the ‘brain-heavy’ Cooller, we couldn’t have asked for a better tournament.

Seriously. It couldn’t have been any better.

Quake Live TV has already grown so much from this event… I only wish that the network was more stable and that we had delivered an even better show to the spectators, free of spinning logo purgatory and full of frags. You’d best bet that next time we will come with an even better set up, a more experienced team, and a clearer game plan.

I also gotta shout out to all of the Quake community – you guys rock. It’s so interesting to see so many individuals, who are all united by a common interest yet only see each other for a few weeks a year, come together quite seamlessly. I loved getting to know and partying with you all.

Over the course of the next few days we will hopefully catch up with all the content we were able to produce. There are plenty of pictures, videos, and articles that are working their way through the pipeline, so please stay tuned as we release additional coverage.

So in the end what can I say other than THANKS id/Bethesda/Zenimax for making such a great game and corresponding event, THANKS to the Quake Live TV staff for working their asses off, THANKS to all of the players for all the great games, and to all who watched live… you are the reason we do what we do. Keep on supporting eSports and Quake — I know I’ll be here for the long haul, I hope you will be too.

And you wanna know the best part of the whole event? I gained 60 followers in 3 days!!!

“Keep it sexy, stay frosty.” © proZaC

FishStix, out.