epic.NINETEEN Day 1

Welcome to epic.NINETEEN here at Kettering Conference Centre. Despite some teething problems at the start of the event, we're back on track with our jam packed social timetable and our eSports tournaments that you all know and love. We had a fairly smooth build process - despite several members of staff getting stuck in lifts - and when we opened the doors at 4 o'clock we were more than happy to see lots of familiar faces and many new ones. 

Day 1 at every epic.LAN event puts the network to the test but thanks to our fantastic Technical and Event teams, issues were resolved quickly and you guys made it a lot smoother by offering your help and bearing with us. So thank you to all of you for that. Walking around the two main gaming halls there was some strong banter from the word go and this continued all the way in to the Opening Ceremony, hosted by JoeShow and Naysayerz in the Gallery. 

If you missed it, JoeShow's opening video was an epic.Stream Team takeover montage that saw our very own Ddanblack, LZStealth, Princess Beej, Reech, DrunkieMunkie and newcomer Ash taking on challenges set by the Big Dill himself. Challenges included reading a line from a book backwards, finding 5 orange objects in less than a minute and (our personal favourite) describing how they would propose to Winbar! The epic.Stream Team are an integral part of the epic.LAN family, providing you guys with streamed content between events every night of the week. If you haven't already, head over to our Twitch channel and hit that follow/subscribe button to stay up to date with us all year round.

Winbar took over the mic to welcome you to the event and give thanks to all of you who support epic.LAN, and the 40ish volunteers that make epic.LAN possible. He also talked about our recent EGX adventure, which saw us hosting the Overwatch tournament and tearing up the free bar. If you didn't catch the live streams at EGX, or you want to watch them again then you can head over to our Twitch channel where you can watch past broadcasts of the tournament and laugh at just how badly Gumpster pronounces the names of Overwatch heroes. Finally, Winbar gave a little shout out to the staff who between them have lost a combined weight of 16st! So well done to everyone who has made a change for the better this year - both staff and you guys in the gaming halls.

JoeShow and Naysayerz then hyped you all up with some blindfolded tetris, with help from a couple of you in the audience, which was possibly even funnier than watching Ddanblack dancing along to Taylor Swift only moments before. Yes Danny - we were all watching. And the level of competition between Joe and Nay was something to behold, although not quite as jaw-dropping as seeing Joe don a 'Trump' wig and present the rest of the ceremony partly in character! We don't know if it was the sudden abundance of hair or the way Joe effortlessly styled it out, but it was a thing of beauty.

We hope you all had a fantastic first night at epic.NINETEEN. As always, if you have any issues or need some assistance come and find a member of staff!