In 1996 in Spain, the director of a Radio station Paco Ragageles, had the idea to give a big push to the Internet and specially to things related to gaming, music and design. With this rush of ideas he created what today is known as the biggest LAN Party in Spain, the Campus-Party.
The Campus-Party is a LAN party that has been improving since the very beginning, getting better as each day goes by. They have been expanding with more huge competitions for different games, interesting prizes, courses to learn different things and get a title from it and conferences with various interesting topics. But on the other hand, also a fun offer with night parties to chill after a hard gaming day, trips to the beach which is not so far from the event, a private camping, where to sleep, prepared for all the gamers or, of course, the possibility to book a Hotel around the event. In my opinion Campus-Party is what we today could call a very complete "Gamers Vacation"!
It seems like things will be changing in a positive way this summer since new improved ideas will be added to the organization of the event. I could give you as an example the large amount of spots reserved for people coming from other countries. Furthermore there's a full list of games which will be played: Counter-Strike, Fifa, NBA 2005, Gran Turismo 4, Need for Speed 2, Warhammer 40.000 Dawn of war, Painkiller and Warcraft III. To this big list of games we see an addition of a very popular game, none other than World of Warcraft.
For the summer of 2005, the action-strategy-gaming competitions are focused on: Counter-Strike, Fifa, Pro evolution 4, NBA 2005, Gran Turismo 4, Need for Speed 2, Warhammer 40.000 Dawn of war, Painkiller and Warcraft III. There will be LAN servers open 24/7 for both new and old games (such as Quake III, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, PainKiller and much more) to make everyone have a good time out of the competitions. And last but not least, the World of Warcraft will also be present this summer!
The Campus-Party will have a simulator area with a real F16-Cockpit of Emycsa this year. There will also be more areas which may be interesting for many people such as "campuscrea" which consist of artistic creations in design and music that will be displayed at the event. For example, the music you create will be played, the t-shirt designs will be sold, the flyers will decorate the whole event and the audiovisual creations will be all over Valencia.
In another section you can go further and present your projects as basic ideas for games. One of the shows will come from a group of people interested in something, nowadays rather pretty famous thing called "modding" which is basically the modding of computer cases in various amazing things. Another one of the big attractions of the Party will be the fight of the robots, which will be created during the event and will have to compete in two different modalities "Sumo Fighters" and "X-treme Robotrackers". This is another one of the competitions where if you show your talent, you can end up the first and earn some money on your hobby!
A new thing will be the section "Star Campus Party" which will allow the people from the event to connect with some of the most important stations around the world, from where everyone will be able to observe the universe.
I want to wish good luck to all the participants. For more informations check out the lan party's official site simply by clicking here.