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I actually have played a video game to a crowd of thousands of people. The finals of a Guitar Hero tournament were on stage at Family Values Tour. I can't find reliable attendance numbers from Pittsburgh in 2007, but the venue had 23,000 seats. Well, the lawn doesn't have seats, you know what I mean. I was pretty good at Guitar Hero. I recently checked, and I'm still 8,884th on Guitar Hero II for XBox Live, out of 2.3 million. So when I heard this tournament was happening, I was in. I spent hours practicing extra hard. First round was at a local bar, and you had to be the Nth caller to the local radio station to get a spot. Through some persistence, I made it happen. Lots of the people weren't even that great, one guy had never even played before. I ended up winning that pretty handily. They held a ton more of these preliminary tournaments, and then 16 (I think) of us got free tickets to the tour. Woo! Showing up, there was a tent where people could play Guitar Hero. We held another elimination tournament there, with the top two facing off on main stage. A friend that I knew from the competitive Guitar Hero forums and I had both brought cheat sheets with the optimal star power patterns on them. Such nerds. We were the only ones who did, and we pretty handily wiped up everyone else. So, he and I got to play "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine on main stage, winner got a real guitar and to hang out with Korn. Of course, said friend (who now works on C# for Microsoft, actually...) was even better than I was, and solidly beat me. Oh well. It was still super amazing. From time to time I find an arcade machine (they made them for Guitar Hero II) in the wild, and once or twice I've gotten a little crowd. Mostly from kids. I can totally emphasize with the end of the article, it is pretty exhilarating. |