Let the games begin!

There were a huge number of gaming tournaments at the show, and you can check out the winners and losers over at the Dreamhack homepage. Suffice to say that the main attractions were Counter-Strike 1.6, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Battlefield 2 and Quake 4.

Fatal1ty was hosting a Quake 4 shoot-out live on stage - unsurprisingly, he fragged all comers.


Datorbutiken.se is a Swedish online computer store, and they had a rather odd competition: dress up as a robot and win a computer worth US$5000. The contestants were obviously enthusiastic! The guy on the left is made up of dozens of Jolt Cola and Coke cans, while the mini-gun toting nutter on the right has gone with liberal use of tin foil. Click for full-size embarrassment!


You may remember Micke's Fatal1ty case. The man himself - Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendell - attended the event, and so he was able to sign the finished article - a pretty cool momento! Unfortunately no Uma Thurman to sign the Kill Bill case, which was a big crowd puller on the Colorcase stand.


The guys from TechSweden.org managed to set a new 3DMark 05 record - 18,614 points. These guys are proper crazy - the kind you only find in Scandanavia. We're talking a keg of Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) and loads of other super-hardcore tweaks. The result was an AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 clocked to over 3900MHz, and a Gainward GeForce 7800 GTX clocked to an eye-watering 784MHz core and the memory at an incredible 2058MHz! Even if you can't read Swedish, their worklog is a must read!!

Rounding up

DreamHack is really a crazy experience. Despite my best efforts, it's almost impossible to convey just how huge it really is - you really have to be there to appreciate the scale and scope. With a repeat event in the offing for next Summer, why not see if you can make it across to Sweden and be part of the experience? I'll leave you with a few more shots of Hall 1 - see you in 2006!