This is going to be a short essay. For the first time after an event, I felt that staying quiet and think of the past days was the best I could do. I finally managed to put together a few paragraphs that I combined in this column. I know this event deserves more than what I could capture here, and hope those who were there will help me by sharing their experiences.



Enschede is a town next to the border between the Netherlands and Germany. It is quite convenient as location, as it is served relatively well with public transportation, and still allows those who want to do a road trip to reach it in affordable time from many places in Europe.

The venue for the LAN was in a movie theater complex, in the modern suburbs of the city, near the stadium and the university. The WZZRD bar is a reasonably sized café with a central counter facing three sides of the room, a closed kitchen in the center that would serve hot meals, and places to sit at the outer perimeter. The place would be quiet during the day, and fill up partially during the evening, with regular customers of the bar, people coming out the movies, etc. Even when crowded, there would be space for anyone to watch the matches at the sofa area, order drinks at the bar, and move around. The tables outside would often gather groups of people, some attracted by the fresh air, some by the need for a smoke.



As you know, from a technical point of view there were some organizational problems. The shortage of PCs did create quite some issues, mostly measured in terms of delays. Kudos to those who brought their own screens to help with the situation! Nonetheless, workstations had to be shared between ET and TDM, with long waiting times when games would take longer than expected, and during the transition phases, as monitors and gears needed to be shuffled around. Combined with the fact that the ET games seemed to last forever, this generated the massive lateness the last day. I was among the lucky who planned stay there Sunday night anyways, but some guys had to be back for work on Monday morning, and had to do a long drive to get there.



Besides the schedule problems, this event has been superb. Three days of relax, hanging around with people who understand and share our passion in a perfect environment. Coming home I wondered what Quake really is. Quake gathered us there, dictated the rhythm of each day, forced us to concentrate and give our best. It brought us joy, rage, amusement, frustration, excitement, and a thin veil of gloominess; too soon everything was over, and we were tired, and we silently parted to get back to our lives. Is it really over? I don’t think so. This LAN saw us high in spirit (and sometimes just high :p) and this spirit is what guides us. Let’s continue to play, let’s do tournaments, let’s meet at the next events. This is Quake, and it is fucking awesome.



I want to conclude with a few thanks. First and foremost to nicerdicer. He worked constantly through out the event, and had to manage quite some mess. Kudos. Thanks to Seanza for organizing Adroits! Thanks to zoot, ins, czm, vo0, Av3k, draven and purri for their casting. This was great also for us there. I will not thank all the others individually, but it has been a really great time. I just hope to repeat this, maybe during summer, with more PCs and stuff. Thank you all guys!

Link: gallery