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    My trip to the Winter CPL started very early on Tuesday December 13th. I didn't bother to sleep that night since my flight was to leave at 6:30am, and it's best to be at the airport a good two hours early. The flight to Dallas was probably one of the emptiest planes I've ever been on. As I have done for the past four QuakeCon, I traveled with my friend an co-worker UltimateP, who is extremely helpful with everything during the trip. We arrived in Dallas around 8am and we pleasantly surprised to see that the driver we hired to pick us up at the airport actually showed up on time. Cab fair isn't cheap in Dallas, so the private car service was actually cheaper than taking a cab. The service, which was recommended by the CPL, passes them selves off as a limo company, but they really use Lincoln town cars. In an hour we had reached our hotel in downtown Dallas and checked in.    

    I had previously stayed at the hotel back in 2000 for the Razer CPL event, but I had no idea that most of the hotel isn't wired with Ethernet for internet access. Instead they have a fairly fast WiFi network available to every room. Since our main coverage of the event was going to be through the videos we recorded, we really needed the fastest connection we could get for uploading the videos to our servers. So after asking the front desk, we found out that a side section of the hotel did have wired internet connections. Already having assembled our four computer setup, we painstakingly agreed that in would be in our best interest to change rooms. In took us three trips to move all the luggage over, but it was worth it. The upload speed in the new room reached up to 1MB/sec compared to the 200KB/s we were getting via the WiFi in the first room. After setting up all our computers again, I called up "Prognar", our friend in Dallas who most of you probably know from his humorous interview with Fatal1ty at QuakeCon 2005. Most people remember him since he wears a biker helmet which some believe looks like a nazi helmet. In reality, the helmet does resemble a German helmet, but not the kind worn during WWII when Germany was under Nazi control. It most closely looks like a helmet worn by Germans during WWI. Anyway, since we didn't have a car of our own, Prognar offered to drive us around. Tuesday we had a visit of id Software planned and Prognar was also going to try to get us a tour of Fountainhead Entertainment, the company started by John Carmack's wife Anna. Interesting enough, Fountainhead is located in the "big black cube", the nickname given to the building were id Software was located until mid 2000. Prognar had interned at Fountainhead a few years back, so that's how we got to check out their setup. I've been wanting the chance to check out id's current offices for awhile, but I'm never in Texas anytime other than during QuakeCon, the busiest time of the year for id's business team, so a time could never be worked out. I did have the honor of visiting id five years ago while they were located in their old offices, the same offices in which they developed some of the greatest games ever made.    

    When walking into the two story office building where id Software is headquartered, you won't see any references to the company being there, since as they told me, if someone is going into the building for another reason, and they see that a software company is in there, they would want to check it out, and they don't have the time to give every interested person off the street a tour. In just happened that id's secretary Donna Jackson, also know as "the id mom", was picking up the mail and heading back to the office at the same time the three of us were wondering around the first floor of the building looking for id. It was pretty obvious to her that these three college aged kids were looking for id, so she escorted us to the second floor where id is located. When you first walk in, you are greeted by a huge DOOM logo, multiple pinball machines, and lots of awards blanketing the walls. Donna informed Marty Stratton, id's director of business development, that we have arrived and the tour of id began. For the amount of notoriety, fame, history, and money they have garnered over the years, you would think they would have a huge facility in which to work in, but that isn't the case. The entire company only employs twenty-six people, of which three take care of administrative business. We stayed at id a lot longer than I thought we would be there. We talked with Marty about many different subjects such as the Quake3 mods, the DOOM movie, ET: QuakeWars, and QuakeCon. He was very courteous, offering us drinks in the id kitchen and even gave me a t-shirt and CoD2, after I told him I wasn't going to buy the game since it didn't use an id engine. After I said that, he explained to me that even though Infinity Ward promoted CoD2 as using a new engine, much of code in in the game was from previous engines made by id. If you look closely at the bottom of CoD2 box, you will see a id Software copyright notice. While we were there, we got to see pretty much the entire development team, including John Carmack himself. We got to speak with John Root, the newly hired lead animator at id, who we saw at CPL a few days later. Marty and the rest of the id guys were very nice and it was very cool seeing their setup. After leaving id, we headed over to Fountainhead Entertainment, located only a few minutes away. While Anna Carmack wasn't there, we did get to meet with some of the other developers who showed us some of the new cell phones games which they are working it. After about an hour, we left and headed to Prognar's house for dinner.

    The next day, thing started off slow, because the Quake4 tournament got delayed for a few hours. To pass the time, UltimateP and I headed over the the 6th Floor Museum, located only a few blocks away from the hotel. If you don't know, the building is the one from which it is believed a sniper shot and killed American President John F. Kennedy. The building, which was formally a book depository is now a museum, dedicated to President Kennedy. It was worth the ten bucks we paid to get in. After we were finished, we darted past all the vagrants outside the museum, and walked back to the hotel in the abnormal cold weather Texas was experiencing. When we returned, the tournament had started along with iTG and TSN's coverage of the games.     While the Team Sportscast Network has been broadcasting from CPL events for years now, this was Radio iTG's first time. While I'm not going to bash TSN here, I do want to express why I prefer iTG over TSN. For one, iTG has supported Quake3 by casting tons of online matches and traveling the world to many big Quake3 tournaments. Even though Quake3 was never as popular as CounterStrike, even in it's prime, iTG stuck with the game, providing unmatched shoutcasting quality and more recently video. Secondly, I think most people would agree with me, that when you think about shoutcasting and Quake3 at the same time, you will immediately think of djWHEAT. Not only does he have a great tone and excitement to his voice, he is/was a very skilled Quake3 player himself, giving him a better insight to the game's he casts. At this CPL event, it was clear that TSN had a more dominated presence. Their booth was centered right in front of the tournament area compared to iTG which was located on the far left side. TSN had a much larger crew compared to iTG, which only flew out five people. TSN had more cameras, mixers, computers, plasmas, but one thing they did lack was a track record in Quake. It was TSN's resistance to assemble a larger crew for QuakeCon 2003 that made the QuakeCon organization not invite them back and start their own shoutcasting team that year (and we all know how that turned out; XCast!). You can look at what happened and say TSN was just making sure their services were being seen by the largest audience, but in my mind, their decision not to focus more heavily on QuakeCon made me lose respect for them. For sure I am biased, because of the high regard iTG has shown towards me over the year, including at this latest event. I'm a pretty loyal guy and whoever didn't support Quake3 and now all of a sudden wants to jump on the Quake4 bandwagon, won't have my support when there are others out there who have supported the Quake community through thick and thin.

    Since I didn't bring a computer good enough to play Quake4 on, I didn't have the chance to frag with the good amount of people playing Quake4 in the BYOC. So I basically spent Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday watching Q4 matches, filming and taking pictures of the tourney contestants, and just hanging out. The first two nights, Prognar took us out to dinner, which was nice. Not until Saturday would we be really busy again. Saturday we had an interview with Mr. Fatal1ty scheduled and also Prognar had tentatively setup an interview with two girls from Clan PMS. I had seen a girl from clan PMS on MTV's coverage of the CPL World Tour Finals and of course I remembered the clan name from my Quake2 days, so I thought it would be interesting to let the interview go forward.

    At 1:00pm Saturday we setup for our first interview of the day with V3NUS and Cella from Clan PMS. We got the O.K. from a CPL official to film on the top of the stairs of the second entrance to the BYOC. While it provided a nice background, the lighting was not very good. Thankfully, UltimateP had brought along two powerful lights, which made the area look great on camera. While filming the interview, we had numerous on lookers from the backside of where we were filming since the doors to this second BYOC entrance had to be opened. Thankfully, no one did anything to hinder us while filming. Once the PMS interview was complete, we left our setup in place, since we would be interviewing Fata1lty about forty minutes from that time. UltimateP got some pizza and we hung out there, going over the questions we would be asking Mr. Wendell. Twenty minutes before the interview, we doubled checked to make sure our equipment was working and turned on the lights to make sure they were heated up. Once that was done, I headed upstairs to get Fata1lty for the interview. A few days earlier, Fata1lty's press people had e-mailed me with his location at the hotel, a suite on the third floor. When I arrived outside his room the maid was there cleaning. The first thing that caught my eye was the notice posted on his door. It was a disclaimer saying something to the effect that when you entered his room you released your rights and would allow yourself to be filmed. I found that pretty interesting. The maid was finishing up, so I decided to wait a minute before she left to enter the room. I knocked twice times, but no one was responding, so I just went in. John was sitting at his computer when I walked in looking at a website. Pretty sure he remembered me from when we had met earlier in the year at QuakeCon. I waited for him to close the terrace door and pickup something from another room and then we proceeded downstairs. One of the first questions I asked him while we walked downstairs was why he was not competing in the Quake4 tourney at the event. He told me that he was still relaxing from his big win at the CPL World Tour Finals in New York and that he really had not spent much time practicing Quake4. He was just attending the event to support the gaming community. Previously, I had thought the event I was attending was a qualifier for the summer Quake4 tourney, but John explained to me that it really wasn't and that he would be competing at the summer event. Oddly, this was really my first on camera interview. I really was not nervous, but for some reason, my leg moved quite a bit during the interview. I know that annoyed some people who downloaded the video. Overall though, I was happy with how the interview went. The worse thing that can happen, is that person you are interviewing has little or nothing to say to the questions you ask. Dealing with a professional like Fata1lty though, I did not expect that to happen. Once the interview was done, we packed up all our equipment and headed back to the room. I had the not so bright idea to first render the video in the 1080i resolution, which didn't finish to the following morning. When that file turned out to be around seven-hundred megs, I knew that it was not worth putting up for download. From there, I started to render to video at the lower 720i resolution. That file would be rendering during the time the finals were taking place on Sunday, so once it was done, the Fata1lty and PMS interviews were put on hold for us to concentrate on getting the Quake3 finals video up for download.

    I didn't get to experience the finals the way in which I would have like to the most. Instead of sitting at the Radio iTG booth watching Quake4 on the beautiful plasmas they had setup and listening to them casting, I was stuck standing on top of a chair filming from outside the tourney area. It wasn't the most glamorous position to be in, but the angle for shooting the video was excellent. I could film both toxic and cooller's monitors. I know how many people around the world would have loved to experience the event, so I did my best to film in the most exciting way. Trillian from Radio iTG gave us the O.K. to hook into their audio feed for the video, which really made it much more entertaining. Immediately after the finals and awards ceremony had ended, we packed up the camera, tripod, wireless microphone system, and electrical cords and headed straight back to the room. Once back in the room, I hastily worked on getting the video ripped, edited, rendered, and put up for download. To pass the time, we went down to the overpriced empty restaurant located on the third floor of the hotel. At this time, I still had the Fatal1ty and Clan PMS interviews to put up for download. They wouldn't be made public until I got back home. I had a good feeling that the finals video was going to be really popular, because of the success of the QuakeCon 2004 finals video I shot. The QuakeCon video was not only shot with my old camcorder, but I didn't use a tripod nor did I have an audio feed of game commentary.

    The awards ceremony was for sure the worst I've ever experienced personally. I can even think back to my first QuakeCon in 2002 where the awards ceremony was a very exciting moment. To present the checks to the CounterStrike players, an Intel representative was on hand. Now on to the presentation of the checks to the Quake4 players which I included in the Quake4 finals video I put up for download. Two representatives from the Verizon phone company were on stage to present the checks. Only one of the two guys did anything though. The taller guy called out the player's names and handed out the checks. It was a very dry awards ceremony, with no music, very little applause and excitement in the air. This was probably due to the fact that there weren't many people actually there to witness the ceremony. Not that in matters that much, but the vanity checks the top three players received also looked dull, being plain black, and were dented quite a bit.

    Overall, I had a great time at the event. I have high hopes for Quake4 and I thought it would be fitting to experience the first Quake4 tourney in U.S. first hand and report back to you guys my experience through videos, pictures, and this article. I remember for one of the videos I posted from QuakeCon 2005, someone commented on the good quality of the video, so I was sure no one would be disappointed with the High Definition content we provided this time.

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