Lucky number 13. While not planned that way "LL13" was fated to become our last event as the staff started to seek careers and buy houses.
One bitter prankster thought it would be fun to call 911. The firemen were sure to ask how to enter the next CS tournament before leaving.
Unfortunately many gamers (who failed to prepay) were turned away at the door as we were only able fit 183 of you onto our power grid.
Our first and only two-day event drew 243 gamers from Nova Scotia to Riverside, California. With the 1.6 tournament on Saturday and the Source tournament on Sunday it never got too crowded as gamers showed and left for their respective day(s).
It took us ten tries but we finally refined tournaments to a science. Additional equipment and automated server technology ensured that LLX ran more smoothly than any event we'd had so far.
A new building, a new network, and new sponsors. We stepped up from holding 80 person events to our first 150 person LAN.
Hurricane Katrina was a major tragedy. Hoping to show our community's willingness to help, we teamed up with Ranken Technical College and Best Buy to raise $2,180 for Red Cross's Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
Luck was on our side. A lightning storm knocked out the electricty all around us - Chesterfield literally went dark for hours. Our building powered through the storm and we fragged late into the night.
Back when Gameriot was still touring the country demonstrating the future of gaming they made a stop in Saint Louis. We had to check it out.
Despite some controversy over a Counter-Strike themed ice cream cake, this event was a major breakthrough; we more than doubled the attendance of our previous event. This event also marked the debut of our web-based game-server browser.
Twas the weekend before Christmas and all through the church, not a creature was stirring except for some nerds...
Today it's hard to imagine a LAN without an Internet connection, but it was still commonplace at this time. Unfortunately, Valve's recently introduced and very buggy Steam service provided many headaches with a partially functioning 'offline mode'. There's nothing like passing around the ol' 56k modem and borrowing a NetZero account to get your games up to date.
How quaint - technology certainly marches on. One attendee (Sasquatch) made major waves as he showed off his rig with a whooping 1 terabyte of hard drive space (spread across 12 hard drives). I remember being unable to comprehend what one would do with so much space.
Our first event featuring tournaments (in Starcraft and Counter-Strike 1.5).
