London Game Festival 2006: Been there, seen that, got the T-shirt!

**oldengineer** · 08/10/06, 10:20

Yesterday I managed to pop into the Oxford Street (London U.K) branch of HMV.

Background:

...It was the last day of the first ever 'London Game Festival'!!!

www.londongamesfestival.com

Showcase Events ranged from Development > AI in games > Art in games > Play in games >Awards in games >Middleware in games > Learning in games > Films to finally showcasing the games.

All of these events were held at various prestigious locations around London such as:

Science Museum
Hammersmith Apollo
Imerial College London
Soho Theatre
National Film Theatre
Karamel Club
The Roundhouse
London Trocadero

Example showcase games were:

Pro Evolution Soccer 6
Splinter Cell: Double Agent
Rainbow Six: Vegas
Xbox LIVE Arcade
Pro Stroke Golf
PDC World Championship Golf
Table Tennis

...All on the Xbox 360 of course.

Sponsers:

The event ran from 02/10/06 - 08/10/06 and was sponsored by a lot of major players such as:

Microsoft
Nintendo
SEGA
Ubisoft
2K
EA
KISS
Image Publishing
IGN
Eurogamer
Gamespot U.K
Totally Lond ON
British Academy: Video game awards
ELSPA
Tiga
London Development Agency
HMV
VUE

Event review:

In typical U.K fashion the event was pretty low key, but hey you have to start somewhere, and this was their first year to be fair!

In HMV the event occupied a mainstage roughly 30 foot square.

It consisted of a 'staged' actual table tennis table with two large flat screen monitors set back-to-back, running off two Xbox 360's, which were both playing the hugely popular Rockstar developed game 'Table Tennis'.

Around the edge of the stage there was four off Xbox 360 demo units all running Table Tennis of course!

There was a few Rockstar stickers and a nice little LGF souvenier book that could be had for free...

...Rockstar T-shirts and sweatbands had to be 'earned', which was a nice touch I thought.

To earn them you had to play on the mainstage, winner took a T-shirt and a sweatband, loser just got the sweatband.

...Redbull was being given away as 'fuel' for the event, I didn't need artificial stimulants to win, so I skipped that bit.

Gaming was busy and brisk, lot's of people wanted to get their hands on the swag I guess.

Anyway we had got there nice and early so I ended up playing my son, who amazingly I managed to beat, much to his annoyence, followed by numerous reasons as to why he lost!!!

...All in all a fun time and definately worth a peek at.