DreamHack Summer Festival kicks off! Day One!

For those of you who might not know, DreamHack is known as the world’s largest digital festival. It started in the early 90’s by some friends from the same school, and eventually moved into their school canteen in 1994. it has only grown since then, being hosted 4 times a year in Sweden, and is currently known to have the Guinness World Record for the largest LAN party in the world, with a staggering 12,754 computers all combined to create one huge multi user gaming setup. (Imagine the cable tidying on that bad boy!)

Just to give a little hint as to how big DreamHack has actually become, here’s a rather nice picture from a few years ago.

This summer, the festivities began yesterday, and will run till the 21st of June, where attendees will be able to see new technology, play games, and get nice and warm in the ridiculous Party area.

So with all this buzz of electricity and news, where to begin? Well for any of you looking to spend some time watching the action live, there are multiple streams across the board, from all the games and events being held over the weekend. Some of these can be found here, but the popular ones are listed below to take you straight into the action.

• Main Stage
• League of Legends
  
• Counter Strike 1.6
  
• Starcraft 2
  
• Quake Live
  

What’s happened so far this weekend?

Well, for starters it’s been huge in the Starcraft 2 community! I for one am a HUGE Starcraft 2 fan, and have been watching some of the games casted by Day[9] and d’Apollo all last night. These can be found here, and I would highly recommend the Thorzain vs July games, possibly one of the best Terran vs Zerg series I have ever seen.

Although this is a LAN centric festival, it’s not just all PC-PC-PC. There is a huge backing for mobile games, and those playing around with Android phone might have heard of a game called Turf. This is a fairly simple, highly competitive mobile application, which interestingly asks users to visit certain areas of a town, and perform specific tasks. Players who complete these tasks can then “own” that region in the game, and compete for prizes. You can view more information here (in Swedish, newer browsers will translate).

As always, Intel are all over this festival, supporting the new Trackmania 2 announcements, and the Quake Live sessions available to players. They have released a one of a kind Intel pack, including an SSD, Teeshirt and Assassins creed game, only available at the DreamHack event.

Trackmania 2 details

Over years, Trackmania has arguably been one of the most popular free to play online PC games. Still offering activities updated daily by the players, the game is able to log in 700 thousand users every month, which is huge when considering it was released all that time ago. The new iteration of the game comes with a cloud service called “ManiaPlanet”. This offers players a better experience by adding new genres, Shootmania and Questmania will be added, a shooter and rpg variant of the original game. Interesting to say the least, allowing gamers to enjoy the Mania universe however they want. The official DreamHack presentation for Trackmania will be available on Monday the 20th, in the DreamHack Orange stage.

Grand Turismo 5

Coca Cola Zero have supported a GT5 tournament int heir booth at the DreamHack festival. The trial run is being hosted today, registering the best track times, and tomorrow ten of these players will go head to head to see who is the one to advance to the semi finals, hosted on Monday.
They also give out loads of Coke Zero for free, could be worth attending next year for this alone!

Western Digital

Western Digital are at the event, as well as hosting their own booth with new technology, they are sponsoring a Trackmania 2 tournament, so if any of you avid TM gamers are out there, feel free to give it a watch on the streams!

DH Game for next event

Everyone now has the ability to win tickets for the next event! An online game, which will require intellect, craftiness and the ability to think logically are key to success. The first prize for this game is TEN tickets to the next DreamHack event!

There is a tutorial and more information available here, but be wary, the game started last night, so you will have to be quick to catch up!

At 7pm last night, Dice opened the doors to the Battlefield 3 booth. Entrants have to be over 18, but we can only speculate what will be on show!

On Sunday and Monday, SteelSeries and Total Biscuit will both be present at the event. The stream will be available to all those who aren’t attending, starting at the following times:

• Sunday: 19:00 – 22:00 (estimated, may however change a little bit depending on the SC2-schedule)
• Monday: 18:00 – 20:00
  Times are in CE(S)T.

Total Biscuit will be commentating the Starcraft 2 tournament throughout the weekend on the stream denoted at the top of this feed.

Street Fighter IV are showing off their latest and possibly greatest game int he series, with a tournament (surprisingly) and again, a live stream of the finals. The Stream will be at Dreamhack.TV, found here.

Qpad are hosting a simple competition in the Komplett booth, including Qpad’s own zAAz. The Task? Kill her 5 times in Counter Strike. The prize? a Mousepad and a Teeshirt. Kill her 10 times? you’ll win the new Qpad Keyboard! Good luck to those trying, I heard she’s quite the boss.

Samsung are at DreamHack, showing off their new range of 3D monitor sets, allowing users to play Call Of Duty Black Ops. Visitors will be able to log into their Steam accounts and play a variety of games downloaded prematurely and users will be able to watch a Black Eyed Peas concert in 3D. Also, there’s free popcorn every half hour…. DO WANT.

Well that’s a “quick” summary of what’s happened so far at the DreamHack Festival, Summer 2011, plenty of tournaments, let’s see who advances to be the DreamHack Summer Champions!