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LEFTEROS / PERSONAL NOTES

GameAthlon 2013, the RFS Dev Team and the 8,000-player record

28 June 2013 / Lefteris Iliadis / SomniusX

An almost archival three days: 28–30 June 2013 in central Athens, our team took part in the HAEC GameAthlon and the RFS Dev Team did something that seemed impossible at the time.

GameAthlon event logo

Event logo — source: in.gr.

The event

GameAthlon was held at the Hellenic American Union building, 22 Massalias Street in Kolonaki, with free entry. It was the biggest gaming event that had taken place in Greece until then: roughly 1,500 players, a large number of PCs and Xbox 360 consoles, VRT Formula simulators, and seats in the venue for the content creators who streamed the event live.

The GameAthlon hall

Photo from the event — source: in.gr.

The tournaments included League of Legends, FIFA 2013, Halo 4 (for the first time in Greece), NBA2K13, Street Fighter IV, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, VRT Formula and Kinect Dance Central 3, with cash prizes and gifts for the winners. The final day also hosted a cosplay competition.

Players and stations during the three-day event

Photo from the tournament hall — source: in.gr.

In parallel there were talks and workshops on game development, safe smartphone use, protection against online threats, network management and app development.

The RFS Dev Team at GameAthlon

I went there as team leader of the RFS Dev Team (Rainbow Family Servers Development), the team that built the servers for the Rainbow Family Servers community. The owner was Padakoys, the IT lead was Yorgaraz, and with us were Flevasgr, LightningBlader (just right for 2013 l33t-speak) and many more.

What we presented that day was a fully working custom Minecraft server that kept over 8,000 logged-in users connected at the same time — a record number for that era.

Frame from the montage video I prepared for the event

Frame from the montage video I put together for the event: watch it on YouTube.

I also gave a short talk on the indie gaming scene of 2013 — how a small group of volunteers can build infrastructure and content that holds its own against the big studios. We had also set up a corner with computers for the youtubers of the time: CaptainPanez, Base, NinjaCakeAssassin and others.

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