Battle Royale Round 2

On January 24th, 2009, gamers in the Ottawa area flocked to Carleton University's Porter Hall for 24 hours of hard core gaming action. The spectacle is lovingly named Battle Royale and was celebrating its second year.

I stopped by the big event wearing my Google Campus Ambassador shirt, goodies in hand. I was very happy to be able to connect the organizers of Battle Royale with my contacts at Google, and even happier that Google was willing and able to sponsor the event with giveaways and prizes. I visited each gamer personally, giving them their choice of Google pen and sticker set. I was pleased to find that most didn't mind risking whatever game they were in the middle of playing to select their swag and chat for a minute or two.

Google sent me two raffle prizes as well: a backpack and a jenga set with the Google logo. They always find such creative ways of branding everyday items with their famous logo. I hope the winners enjoy being the envy of their friends. :)

Overall, I was pretty impressed with the setup of this event. It was obviously not trivial to satisfy the power requirements for over 100 computers, and I wouldn't even know where to begin when trying to network them all together. There were two big projector screens for playing Rock Band and Super Smash Brothers, drinks and snacks for sale (the first two of which were included with the ticket price), and probably enough prizes for everyone to walk away with something. Kudos to the organizers!

A few more photos of the event can be found here.