LANFest and My Casting Debut

LANFest registration desk

This past weekend I got to attend a LANFest, specifically LANFest Sacramento. For those who don't know what that stands for, LAN means "Local Area Network," and it was the way we nerds got to play multiplayer games before the Internet became viable for them. We would get together at some office or home, bring our (often huge and klunky) PCs, monitors, and peripherals, network them together, then play multiplayer games all day or all weekend long.

Here is a video of LANFest that was just uploaded:

Considering how prevalent gaming on the Internet is these days, one could look at a LANFest now as a quaint concept, much like this old-style PC that someone brought to the event for show:

The original IBM PC from the 1980's. Amazing that it still works.

But nothing really beats having people physically present in the same room.

There were many games being played at this LANFest, including Starcraft II, League of Legends, Team Fortress, Counterstrike, DotA, and Call of Duty. Of course, the only game that I ended up playing here was Starcraft II. ;-)

Plenty of people had cool designs for their PC cases. Here are a couple of examples:

This PC has four graphics cards chained together in an SLI setup, which is rather crazy.

This PC was modeled after the popular game Minecraft.

Heeeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeeee's Segallion!

As for my casting debut, there was a Starcraft II tournament going on when I arrived at the LANFest. I got there too late to join the tournament, but the final matches were being streamed onto TwitchTV and live-casted.

To my surprise, the organizer asked the whole event for a volunteer to be a co-caster. Being a huge fan of Starcraft II casters like Husky and Day9 (whom I've mentioned before in my blog), I took this opportunity to try being a caster myself!

Here's a screenshot of what the cast looked like on the livestream. You can see me in the lower-right corner; I'm the guy on the left:

The cast of the entire semi-finals and finals is currently archived here, but I'm not sure how long this archive will be around. It's also three hours long, so I'm going to try and get the video, edit it into parts, and upload them onto YouTube, assuming that's OK by the LANFest organizers and TwitchTV.

Although I feel like I sound like a fanboy trying to cast, I think I want to try and become an amateur game caster after this because it is a lot of fun. Not only will this help advance my gaming hobby, it could also help my public speaking skills, and that can help every aspect of my life.