DreamHack Winter 2006

This weekend I went to the ‘DreamHack Winter 2006‘ LAN-party in Jönköping, Sweden.

I normally meet up with some of my old friends every year between christmas and new years eve and spend a couple of days coding and other geeky stuff. Back in the old days we used to go to ‘The Party’ in Aars, Denmark, but the last couple of years we have been having our own small private gatherings.

DreamHack set a world record this year. It is the greatest computer party ever. Guinness book of records was there to verify it - 7752 paying guests, and 7788 computers connected to the network!!!

And the party truly was gigantic. We were very impressed of how smooth everything went despite the many people that were gathering in such a small area.

There was a lot of events and funny gimmicks. There were competitions for various games along with graphics, music and demo competitions. Then there was funny events like ‘Doctor Love’ (a live nerd-dating-show). Drag Queen and Drag King competitions. Body crashing (who can drink a bottle of coke fastest), Limbo contest and more.

Every now and then someone would start shouting ‘Haaaallååååå’ in one end of the halls and then a few people in the other end of the hall would respond ‘Haaaallåååå’ and then a massive amount of people everywhere would start shouting ‘Haaaalllåååå’ and the sound wound move back and forth between the halls as different people chimed in. It was funny. Sometimes the ‘Hallå’ was replaced with monkey sounds, but that didn’t engage that many people.

We didn’t participate in any of the competitoins. Instead we spent most of our time making robots for robocode.

If you are looking for a great LAN party - I can strongly recommend going to DreamHack!