The Gathering 1900 - A little report from a little gamer

Our guest writer was at the annual LAN-Party in Hamar, Norway - The Gathering - the world's largest party in it's category and the year's largest happening for lots of humble nerds around the world. So, gimme some more scoop on the bad boy; Figure around 4500, along with their computers, cola boxes, speakers and sleeping bags - in one single big hall. 4500 quakers, programmers, teenies, surfers, hackers, chatters and so on... And all of them in the same place. The Vikingship.

So, here are some thoughts from our personal teenie-gamer. How was the party then?

Posted by Stein Magnus "s-mag" Jodal, 3rd May 2000

What make people drag their computers and CD-collections to an Olympic Stadion for five days and four nights? What make people sit in front of the screen in almost 100 hours without sleeping [you know, the so-called zombies]? With several hundred speakersets around you playing 24 houres per day in five days. I think I now the answer.

The people.

You may want to call them computergeeks, but I think the most important point is that this is a social event that's cool to tell your grandchildren about some years in the future. But - of course - a lot of them live for and with computers and can't imagine a day without 'em. Most people would say that parties like The Gathering must be destructive on the youths, but I claim their'e not. The Gathering is a social event. You meet people in real life that you have met on the net and you meet new people with the same interests as you. You learn a lot - if you want to, and get help to construct your new Linux partitions.

There is a reason to why companies like Cisco - the worlds largest in market value (even bigger than Bill ;) - sponsors The Gathering with an always-working network, Telenor - Norway's AT&T - with 35 Mbps Internet line and so on. They have realised that the 12-20 year old computer geeks will be their employees in 5-15 years, and be the key to further developing of the technology and their stockprices. (Ugh, ugh, yes, of course we will work in those old fat giants and not in small innovative risky firms with expensive option-agreements to everybody on the floor ;)

Okay, here we go. The Gathering 1900. Day one: Wednesday April 19th 2000. The doors opens at nine o'clock (yes, in the morning, you lazy nerd). We arrive by car at 10:10. It's only one big door open to get into the hall. Outside there is a huge bunch of people. Not many, but enough. Around them again you find some more people. They lies relaxed at the gras with an arm around their gray box, and the other around a monitor with memories from lots of events in the nerd life. After some hours everybody is inside and everything is almost set. The first day went as I believe it almost always will, no happenings on the stage, except the birthday of one of the organizers, and no compos. Just the gamers and the classic download-everything-you-find-syndrom all the first-timers (including me) had. It's understandable. 10 Mbps is pretty nice compared to 64 Kbps with one single ISDN-line we're used to use at home.

Day two: Thursday. The first-timers download, the chatters chat, the hackers hack, the gamers play and the quakers quack. Everything is as it is supposed to. As far as I can remember, some of the compos then had started, but I'm not sure (forgive me, I barely slept). In the evening, if we can call it that, the Swedish pop-artist Tess (formerly know as La Cream) arrived an hour late and performed a way-to-short show that ended up with a little glip that again showed us what we knew but didn't wan't to remember: Tess do use a playback.

Day three: Friday. Midway... Hope this will never end. The compos also are midway. At night (0200-0900) when all the 14-years-olds-and-those-who-feel-like-14-year are sleeping, the compoes are rolling over dah big screen. I have never been at The Gathering before (or any other thing like it) and must say I was impressed. Lots of cool 3D Demos and nice music. As far as I remember the winner in the MP3 compo was "Fade to Indigo". I don't remember who made it, but I remember it was a nice tune.

Day four: Saturday. Wedding!! Final rounds. While the day went by all the game compos had their final rounds. The main games was Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament and the old classic StarCraft, something I personally hadn't expected at all, but some people still plays Scorch... Four o'clock PM the probably largest wedding for a single couple in the world took place on the stage. It was the only time in five days all the speakers were turned off, though some headphones still worked. The couple was of course two nerds; Vegar Skjefstad, the boss, and Laila Dalen, his beatiful rose.

Day five: Sunday. Breaking up :( Kinda sad, but it will be lovely to get some sleep $-) Sunday was a pretty boring day. Everybody knew they only had some few hours left to enjoy paradise. The only happening this day was the prizes. The 1th place in the game compoes won 6000 NOK, or 700 USD, and the 2nd place the half. Over 100000 NOK and lots of nice hardware and energy-drinks were given away.

xxxzzzz... TG00... zz = zz... Paradise zzz... TG01.. *sweet dreams*

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