So 15th February saw the first epic at the new venue. We rocked up to Kettering Conference Centre on the Thursday before to be here first thing to get a full day on pre build. Knowing this was gonna be an event which was tight on build time due to it being a brand new venue we knew we would have much more to do  than we previously did at Uttoxeter.

We were right. There was a lot of cabling that needed to be reconfigured into the new layouts to be sure we had enough connection bundles for each room also the new power the venue had put in for us needed routing to where it needed to be. The day flew past and before we knew it we had a room packed full of equipment and we had started to locate some of the equipment out to the different rooms to start bright and early the next day. Our most noticeble new piece of equipment to make the LANs bigger and better for you guys, was stood loud and proud in the gallery. A nice curtained big sceen for the gallery to be used for the opening ceremony, pub quiz, big screen, and tournament finals.

The pre build staff went off for a well deserved meal at this point and to their beds to catch up on as much sleep as possible but that wasn't much as there was another early start on Friday to get into the building as the doors opened to give us maximum time to build the LAN. As we expected during the setup we hit some teething problems which meant we were really up against it time wise. The venue were great and helped us out wherever they could with our requests. Again 4pm came around all to quickly and it was time to start letting in the crouds that had already gathered.

As people came into the building they quickly get set up and there seemed to be a more social atmosphere with our great new breakout space (The Gallery). People met up with team mates and friends and there was soon a real buzz around the venue. I don't think the venue staff knew what had hit them. 

As is traditional for the opening night of an epic we had our opening ceremony which was, as always slightly behind schedule. It didn't matter because it still attracted a big croud of people into the gallery who were entertained by our dancers Joeshow, Ddanblack, Swyft and LinkOnline who danced, competitively might I add, to Gangnam Style on Just Dance 4. JoeShow and Ddanblack were our victors who won In Win Mousemats.

The opening Ceremony came to a close with Winbar throwing out some more In Win goodies to the crowd who then counted us down from ten to open epic.TEN officially.

Just as we had opened Booti chipped in with a suprise announcement, he had made a cake for Winbar and the epic crowd as a congratulations for the 10th anniversary of running LAN gaming events and also for reaching ten events as epic.LAN.