While James "2GD" Harding, Alex "Jehar" Popa and I were on stage and got quite a bit of the lime-light, I want to take the time to give kudos to the people behind the scenes that truly make QuakeCon coverage amazing.

First, the tech crew: Slava "stlava" Markeyev, Alex "SciMech" Kennedy and Brian "_sh" Spence. Slava was the brains of the operation, planned the tech setup before the event and then on-site, organized each segment and acted as the voice of god to let us broadcaster monkeys know when to dance on camera. SciMech managed the stream mixing and production. Brian handled sound... and sadly was so focused on his job that he never had time to explore the event until the last day, I believe.

Next, I want to give mad props to the amazing 4-man media team that put together what, in my opinion, is the finest collection of QuakeCon interviews, walk-abouts, highlights, motion graphics, overlays and other content ever seen at the event. Head over to http://youtube.com/QuakeCon2011 and you'll see the mind-bogglingly professional quality of their work. That team was headed up by Matt "Mattc0m" Richards, co-founder of QLTV. I believe Lennie Moses was the camera man and Anthony Bellissimo and Jason Smith were handling video production. I'm sure Matt will correct me if I haven't described their roles adequately. These guys are just in college... they don't have real video production jobs yet... yet. That being said, they worked their asses off gathering interviews from players, filming the many aspects of the event, and putting together pieces that hopefully gave you viewers at home a far more holistic QuakeCon experience. We really wanted to go beyond the tournament coverage that had been the sole focus on previous years.

Their work would have been without substance if Patrick "emineNce" Boudoucies and Samer "q3samer" Hajaj hadn't stepped up to the plate to act as Quake Live Interviewers and Consultants to the media team. Pat did a great job on camera getting the pros to spill their thoughts and Sammy was busy behind the scenes getting the interviews lined up, helping me gather and organize game demos, and working to get the back-story from players that would feed into the interviews.

Rounding out our team was Krista "RottenRose" Popa and my lovely wife, Nikki Lewis who coordinated the staff, got us wherever we needed to be for meetings and made sure we didn't die of starvation or thirst. Nikki was also handling the @QuakeConCvg twitter account keeping folks updated on the stream schedule.

I also want to personally thank James "2GD" Harding for being generally awesome and agreeing to come back to provide his world-class game analysis for our coverage.

Of course, James probably wouldn't have crossed an ocean and we wouldn't have had nearly as amazing equipment if it hadn't been for the QuakeCon staff, id Software, Betheseda and Zenimax. From what I heard, the BYOC network was the most solid it has ever been. I also think we had zero network downtime... a first for QuakeCon. In fact, Jehar joked on stream after we ran out of matches to cover at the end of Groups that we hardly expected to be online on Day 1. Props again to AT&T and id/Beth/Zeni for making that happen.

I specifically want to thank SyncError and Ash of id Software for interfacing with us and allowing us a level of freedom to push for changes in everything from tournament format to Finals party schedule and stage setup.

Other amazing people that I cannot forget to mention are QuakeCon staffers Xipher, TNT_Trash, Hack and Polecat and Alford Media, lead by Steve and the rest of his A/V crew. Our production could not have been possible without all of these guys and their respective teams.

From Cluster to Success