For PJ Luus and his friends, it’s worth it to camp out in a steaming parking lot for more than 24 hours to get the best spots at the rAge Expo 2015.
Armed with enough beer to get them through the night, Luus and his gamer mates were camping outside the TicketPro Dome on Thursday afternoon in anticipation of South Africa’s biggest gaming expo, ready to join the queue this morning and get the best seats to set up their gaming rigs.
Last year, rAge attracted 32 000 video game enthusiasts, with organisers expecting that number to rise this year throughout the three-day event.
Out of those tens of thousands of guests, at least 2 600 have bought separate tickets to join the network gaming session, which will continue for 52 hours this weekend.
Those 2 600 tickets were sold out in less than two minutes when they were put up online earlier this year.
The set-up for the expo is a complicated one, with international and local sponsors like Hewlett Packard and Internet Solutions providing the infrastructure to allow more than 2 600 computers to connect to a massive network and allow uninterrupted online gaming.
One of the organisers in charge of the set-up, Erich Blaschczok, remembered how he once ran an online gaming expo where he only had to connect 30 computers and how it was considered a mammoth feat for the local gaming scene 15 years ago.
Below the thousands of players and Blaschczok’s team, the elite of the local gaming community will be seated in a separate section for the Telkom Do Gaming League tournament.
The 450 or so entrants will be fighting for their share of R840 000 in cash prizes, with those who win the tournaments of the more popular games, Dota 2 and Counterstrike: Global Offensive, set to take home R200 000 in prize money.
For the first time in South African e-sport history, the finals of each of these games will be streamed online for anyone to watch.
Meanwhile, Joburg gamers will be able to experience some brand new tech, the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset that is set to be commercially released in the first quarter of next year.
Computer animation and 3D design school, Learn 3D, were able to secure prototypes as part of their institution’s game development courses, and will be allowing visitors at the expo to try them out. Don’t expect a short queue for your chance to get your hands on them.