Yoink!

Being a fully volunteer organization, we weren't accustomed to having to coordinate with several businesses, each with their own PR requirements and stipulations. We worked with the QuakeCon staff and banged out a press release. When it was ready, we got approval and diligently posted it to ESR, on our website, QuakeCon.org and shared the news far and wide. This original press release got pulled shortly after because a few key pieces, unbeknownst to us, were not yet finalized. No real harm done, honestly, but it did throw off the momentum and meant our own PR guy, Ben "Fishstix" Goldhaber, would be focused on getting that resolved right up to the launch of the event.

Game Faces

Several days later, we were as prepared as could be in 11 days of re-planning, re-purposing and repositioning. The QLTV staff began arriving at the event, with Nathaniel "space" Kay, Slava and Alex "Scimech" Kennedy arriving first. By the time I arrived, much of our booth had been set up by Slava and Alex. I got briefed on the status of everything, said hello to old friends and met some new faces that had joined our staff for the event.

We intended to cover BYOC matches and events from this booth. It was a pretty sweet setup. We would be getting a camera on Day 1 from our friend BMXer that would be positioned in front of the BYOC broadcasting station. There was also a couch in front of it for interviews. Transitioning would simply be a matter of panning the camera down a bit. Or, at least that was the plan.

I headed over to the tournament stage area to see how things were shaping up. The A/V crew was on the ball. Slava and Scimech had already interfaced with them and we were pretty much just waiting on network and Internet to be available for on-site testing with the contracted streaming service. All of the equipment had made it in one piece. Granted, the fans in one of our servers went belly up and QuakeCon staffer Polecat literally MacGyvered CPU fans back onto the thing with the alligator clips from the QuakeCon ID badges. Other than that, things were coming together nicely.

My Kingdom for an Internets!