QuakeCon 2018

It is the happiest time of the year for thousands of gamers, and for good reason! As the largest LAN party in the country with four days of around-the-clock gaming, QuakeCon is the ultimate gaming experience in North America. It is also notorious for showcasing an impressive level of consumption of caffeine and alcohol. A perfect event for the Drinking With Paul team!

Sadly, only one of us could attend this year (check out the video at the bottom, provided by the talented Zachary Cortez, official Friend of Drinking With Paul, to see if you can guess which of us was there). Fortunately, our perennial QuakeCon crew, the Hoagies, was present for support!

CHECKING IN

Outside of packing up to leave, this is the most painful part of the QuakeCon experience. Due to an expanded venue this year, the line to check in equipment was a couple hours long.

Once you’re inside, though, the cool darkness of the LAN room envelopes you and the immensity of what you’ve become a part of begins to sink in.

EVENTS

Where to start? There’s so much going on, you’ll never get any playing done if you try to do it all. To be honest, this year more time was spent hanging out with friends, drinking and smoking cigars, than on the computer.

As he does every year, our friend Riley participated in the BAWLs energy drink chugging contest.

Please allow us to subtly draw your attention to his t-shirt, our Liberty & Freedom Tee, which we are convinced helped him crush the Qualifying Round.

For the third year in a row, our buddy took the Second Place prize. We are all proud of him and his niche talent.

Another annual not-to-be-missed event is the Master Pancake Theater movie. Organized somewhat like Mystery Science Theater 3000, the film this year was Mortal Kombat. While MK is wonderfully terrible in its own right, it is generally agreed that nothing has surpassed the halftime intermission skit from the 50 Shades of Grey showing of 2016.

THE TAKEAWAY

Sure, there is the massive Quake and Doom multiplayer/deathmatch tournaments with over a million dollars of prize money on the line, but QuakeCon really is mostly about enjoying time with friends. I think it is said best by our friend Zach in the below video.