I can’t believe its almost been an entire year since I attended Blizzcon and I have not finished the story! I’ll try my best to remember everything that happened!

Josh and I woke up Friday morning to my iPhone alaram and proceeded to yell “BLIZZCON” to each other in childish voices, as if it were Christmas. Today was the big day, BLIZZCON 2009! We quickly got ready for the day and proceeded to get breakfast. Unfortunately there are no Tim Hortons in California. For breakfast we had to settle with a few muffins and bottled water, however we were too excited to worry about our stomaches.

We crossed the street towards the Anaheim Convention Center and noticed the large flocks of people, name tags hung around necks, heading for the entrance. It was impossible to see the end of the line, there were so many people.

This was the end of the line only minutes ago

We walked around the entire complex to finally see the end of the line and stood there. Shortly after Nick and Matt from Ohio, who we met the previous night at the dinner, joined us in line and we talked about our experience. We came to the conclusion that even if we weren’t about to attend the actual convention, the dinner definitely made the trip.

Nick, Matt and Josh

I was very surprised at the line etiquette of everyone. The line up was surprisingly well organized and there wasn’t a lot of “cutting”. I suppose this could be attributed to the fact that the majority of the people here are introverted nerds and wouldn’t dare piss someone off in real life. To my surprise I saw a guy in a Saskatchewan Rough Riders jersey walking by us, I called him out and he came to talk to us. Turns out he was from Calgary but his Dad grew up in SK so he was a rider fan at heart. We mentioned to him we were on the plane with the Roughriders from Regina to Calgary before flying down to Anaheim. Josh got stuck sitting between two offensive linemen, I got lucky and was put with a couple of assistant coaches, not so big.

Anaheim Convention Center

After being patted down by security, we entered the convention and Josh exclaimed “This is BA as fuck”. Imagine a giant dimly lit hall, in the background a song from one of the many epic Blizzard Entertainment soundtracks. The convention was divided into four halls: Hall A was the World of Warcraft area, B the Real-Time Strategy area (Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3), Hall C was the trade show and panel discussion and finally Hall D was the main stage. Against both the furthest wall was the store, where I later purchased a plush murloc pet. In the WoW area there was a gaming area where you could test out the latest World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm, another gaming area that was for community tournaments, a roped off section of tables for “realm meetings” (at a certain time each day you could go and meet people from the server you played on), and finally the arena tournament stage. The RTS area was similar, two gaming sections full of computers where you could play Starcraft 2 multiplayer or singleplayer, the stage would later feature commentated games from the Starcraft and Warcraft 3 tournaments.

Hall C was the busiest of halls. For the first time ever people got to play Blizzards new unreleased game Diablo 3, the lineups were enormous. The other parts of the hall were scattered with booths for companies like Nvidia, Intel, Razer and other video game related industries. At the front of all this was a stage for a panel of artists, writers or otherwise that did question and answer sessions for things like concept artwork, lore, new features etc.

Hall D was where the magic happened. The main stage. Upon entering the convention we beelined for it in an attempt to get a good seat for CEO/President Mike Morhaime’s keynote presentation. We made the mistake of trying to get a seat close to the front. While there were many empty seats, an entire section was reserved for press and many were being reserved for fellow guild members. We wasted precious time and then decided to backtrack to a more feasible section. We ended up getting four seats about halfway from the stage, except there was a giant pillar in front of us. Luckily, there were about 20 screens in the giant hall showing the stage.

The Main Stage

The first guy who got up on stage was of the charismatic lead designers on WoW. I can’t remember his name exactly but his opening wasn’t very entertaining. He read a post about pet peeve’s to expect at Blizzcon, things like “mouth-breathers” and “people who say LOL in real life”, lot of people got a kick out of it, but we thought it was pretty lame.

Next person to get up on stage was the man, the legend, the guy who we got drunk with last night: Mike Morhaime, CEO and President of Blizzard Entertainment. He welcomed us all and made a joke about more people being here than the undergraduate population at UCLA, I didn’t get it. He talked about how Blizzard wants to become the worlds greatest gaming company and how they take pride in listening to their user base. A player familiar with WoW will understand his next joke, he said that all 20,000 tickets to Blizzcon sold out in under a minute and that it was faster than the amount of time it takes a ret paladin to storm the forums after a nerf. Next he played a video of some of the highlights from the last Blizzcon and Wrath of the Lich King midnight launch. An announcement was made about revamping the Onyxia dungeon in WoW to celebrate the 5th anniversary of World of Warcraft. The better announcement was that they would be releasing Starcraft 2 in 2010, which we were ecstatic about! Sam Raimi was hired to direct the new and upcoming World of Warcraft film. Mike proceeded to thank everyone for making Blizzard games the pinnacle of eSports and announced that there were over $200,000 in cash prizes for the professional gamers attending, no one but us seemed to really care. Mike said “You may notice something different about your goody bags this year”, and someone behind us screamed “Yeah, they sucked!” and everyone proceeded to laugh. There were no beta keys put in the bags this year, which made a lot of people angry. What Mike meant was that there was an exclusive figurine in the bag. Mike then finished his keynote and invited one of the Diablo 3 team members on to introduce the new announced class, the Monk. Then one of the Vice-Presidents announced the new World of Warcraft expansion, cataclysm.

Now that the pageantry was finished with, we were free to do whatever we wanted. The first thing that came to mind was the biggest reason we were at Blizzcon to begin with, professional Starcraft. We headed over to the pro-gamer area in the RTS hall. It was a neatly sectioned off rectangle with about a dozen computers, this was located to the right of the stage against a wall. Luckily for us, the majority of Blizzcon attendees were here for World of Warcraft, not the 10-year-old game that we cherished so much.

The pro-gamer Area. ret (left, striped shirt) plays against EffOrt surrounded by watching teammates SaviOr and sKyHigh.

Shortly after arriving at the pro-gamer area we saw, in person, the two handsomest of nerds, Nick “Tasteless” Plott and Dan “Artosis” Stemkoski. Nick and Dan both live in Seoul, South Korea and work in the popular eSports industry. Dan is a journalist for SC4All.com and produces media content for the foreigner (non-korean) Starcraft community, while Nick is an english Starcraft commentator for GOM TV. Both of us watched Starcraft weekly, hosted by Artosis, religiously and stayed up until 3am to catch Tastless commentate the GOM TV Invitational tournament as well as the GOM TV Valor tournament. Needless to say it was like seeing the John Madden’s of professional Starcraft. They own and operate a t-shirt company called TheHandsomeNerd, Josh happened to be wearing a “1a2a3a” handsome nerd shirt and they came right up to us and we introduced ourselves. We couldn’t believe this was happening. Shortly after talking to them we snapped a few photos with them before leaving to get ready to commentate. Those two along with DJ Wheat, a Quake icon and eSports legend would be casting the Starcraft games on the stage.

Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski and I

We stuck around the pro-gamer area to watch the pros warm up. I was there to see EffOrt play. Earlier in the month during the GOM TV Invitational EffOrt was set up to play Jaedong, a legendary zerg player. Everyone was rooting for Jaedong because he was most likely going to win, but I decided to cheer for the underdog. Sure enough, a HUGE upset, EffOrt beat Jaedong 2-0 with games lasting under 6mins. An embarrassing loss to Jaedong but a magnificent win for EffOrt.

Nick "Tasteless" Plott and I

Soon the games would begin so we grabbed some food at got some good seats infront of the stage. I remembered our friend Brent was also attending Blizzcon and I asked Josh where he thought Brent would be. We met Brent a few weeks prior at a Starcraft tournament at ZoneGaming, he easily won the whole thing. Suddenly the guy sitting in front of us turned around and said “Hey guys!”. By huge coincidence Brent was sitting directly infront of us. We talked with him about our experience last night at the dinner and how we just met Tasteless and Artosis, he was jealous.

The RTS stage featuring DJTastosis

The first round of games concluded almost as fast as they started. Tasteless and Artosis did a fantastic job commentating and used some inside-jokes and silly humour that we all got a kick out of. Pandabearguy made several appearances in game to the crowds applause and cheers. The rest of the day at Blizzcon was spent browsing the tradeshow booths, getting free stuff, playing some Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and watched the WoW Arena Tournament.

I had played World of Warcraft Arena prior to being there but only to about 1600 rating. I didn’t appreciate it that much until I saw the pros playing. The arena tournament was by far the biggest event at Blizzcon, save for the opening ceremonies/keynote. The hall was packed and the crowd roared when a kill was made, and even bigger screams were heard if there were a counter-kill. I’ve attached a video so that you might experience some of what we did. Because of seeing this event live, I got more into WoW Arena and continue to play it to this day.

Blizzcon 2009 – Wow Arena Clips from Kyle Smyth on Vimeo.

I was a bit disappointed with Diablo 3. It felt very similar to Diablo 2, which was a good thing. But it did not LOOK like Diablo should. I don’t know exactly how I would describe it, but I think it wasn’t ‘dark’ enough. It felt very bright and cartoony, the models looked as if they were just refined World of Warcraft models. When I was a wee little lad, I would run away from my computer and hide because the intro cinematic scared the living shit out of me. Does anyone else remember opening a door in the cathedral in Diablo 1 and suddenly your speakers would scream “FRESH MEAT!” while the butcher chased you down with his giant knife? That kind of thing was what was needed in this game. It felt like it was very noobie friendly and predictable, but the game isn’t even in alpha yet so I suppose I can’t complain too much.

In the evening the big costume contest was going on, although there were some amazing costumes made and being worn, we decided not to check it out. The event was being broadcasted on all the screens in the building so while the lines for everything were almost nonexistent we played a TON of Starcraft 2 and watched the contest while in line. The community tournament area did not have a time limit on how long you were allowed to play, you would sit down at a station and then whoever won would continue seated while a newcomer took your opponents seat. Instead, Josh and I just played game after game and when a Blizzard employee asked how close we were to being done we just said “we are on game 1”. When they stood behind one of us and watched to make sure, we just ended it and got right back in line. I think we racked up a total of 5 hours playing SC2 at the entire event.

A guy on stilts in a Zealot costume, he should have won!

The convention shutting down at the end of the day was not the end for us. There was a TeamLiquid.net meetup happening in a conference room at one of the larger hotels. The main event at the meetup was to watch the Ongamenet Starleague Finals (essentially the Stanley Cup of pro-Starcraft in Korea), but it wasn’t scheduled to start until 3am California time. The first few minutes of the meetup were people talking and meeting each other. We sat and talked with Morell and Chris, two Texans we met earlier in the day at the pro-gamer area. Shortly after the entire CJ Entus team showed up. CJ Entus is a professional Starcraft team and four of their players were playing in the tournament: SaviOr, EffOrt, sKyHigh and idra. Immediately I grabbed my camera and beelined for EffOrt, pointed at my camera and said “Photograph?”. He nodded and Josh and sKyHigh joined us for the most legendary photo I took on my camera all weekend. I set out to do what I wanted most, to get a photo with a korean pro-gamer, specifically CJ EffOrt. Quickly the rest of the nerds swarmed them and the CJ translator denied any more photos, we were so lucky! CJ Entus got up at the front of the conference room and introduced themselves and had a little trivia contest to give away some of their new gear. When someone asked how they think they would do tomorrow in the finals, they gave EffOrt the mic, which then went to the translator to say “He is sure he will win tomorrow”, so badass.

Kim Jung "EffOrt" Woo, myself, Jo Byung "sKyHigh" Se and Josh

Once CJ cleared out to get much needed rest for the games tomorrow, two PCs were setup for some show matches before the OSL finals. iNcontrol, an American amateur, challenged anyone in the room to beat him, while drunk. Morell quickly jumped at this opportunity and started to face off against him. Not long after, a completely shit-faced Jos “ret” de Kroon, a dutch pro-gamer that was recently eliminated from the tournament, came up to Morell and told him to move over. Hilarity ensued as ret faced off against iNcontrol, not to mention the drunken shenanigans of them talking trash and pushing each other over.

Joseph "ret" de Kroon gets pushed over and stumbles to get back up

With all the commotion going on, hardly anyone noticed the casters sneak in from the back. I took this opportunity to go talk with them. I introduced myself to Marcus “DJ Wheat” Graham and told him I was a big fan, even back in the good old Counter-Strike 1.6 days when I heard him first commentate. I also mentioned I was a Quake player and he was impressed and told me I should play more Quake-Live than Starcraft, Tasteless and Artosis quickly jumped in and jokingly told me that was a bad idea. I also met one of DJ Wheat’s “henchman”, Rod “Slasher” Breslau, I told him my name was Kyle Smyth and he confused me for a Ryan Smith that trolled him on his Warcraft 3 casts. The caster crew decided that it was late and they should head back to get some rest because they had to “work” tomorrow. They shook my hand and said they’d see me tomorrow.

Not soon after the big names left, Josh and I decided that we didn’t want to stay up all night to watch televised Starcraft when we could just get up and watch LIVE Starcraft the next day. So we left the hotel and went back to ours. We discussed how awesome and unbelievable the day had been. We also couldn’t believe how we completed our goals about getting a photograph with the “celebrities”. Once again we decided that if we weren’t to go back to the convention tomorrow the trip was totally worth it.

For more photographs check out the photoset at flickr.