UMBC Halo 3 launch party a success

October 5th, 2007 by tim finin

Last Friday UMBC held a Halo 3 launch party sponsored by Microsoft, the UMBC Game Room, the UMBC GAIM program and the UMBC Game Developers Club. We had a good number of Xboxes since Professor Marc Olano graciously provided four consoles from the GAIM Lab for the night. Paul Oliver of the GDC described it this way.

“The event was a Game Room, Microsoft, and UMBC Game Dev Club co-sponsored Event. The event was run from 7:00pm to Midnight on Friday, and held in the Game Room, a large room in our student building that has many pool tables, airhockey games, TVs, etc.

We had eight 360s but only seven copies of Halo 3. We ran a tournament using two projectors setup back to back, and then six TVs, two of them were HD, the other four were 27 inches. In order to prevent controller loss we had the game room staff check out controllers — turn in your License or school ID to get a controller. We also taped the DVD tray of the 360s closed so that we didn’t have to worry about copies of Halo 3 walking off.

For the tournament we had 14 teams of four sign up and ran it single elimination. The tournament itself ran from 7:30 to 11:30 with just a short break (20 minutes) for the Imagine Cup presentation. As for the 200 people, we had a lot of people just watching the tournament and a lot of people drifted in and out. The game room was nice enough to donate the usage of all of their equipment, so we had probably 30 of the people at any given time playing pool, airhockey, etc.

The XNA presentation itself went rather well, with many people very interested in it. I also went around to each of the TVs and gave a shorter presentation to everyone who had not been paying attention during the larger presentation. The swag had great prizes for the Halo 3 tournament, with a copy of Halo 3 going to the Game Dev Club, and the games that are arriving to be split up amoung the people who helped me Dr. Olano, who provided four Xbox 360s for the event from the UMBC Gaim Lab.”

Paul took some pictures, which you can see here.

Posted in Events |

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