QuakeCon 2024 has come and passed already and it just seems like yesterday we were once again getting our tickets to the BYOC and getting things ready to head down for another weekend getaway to game ourselves away and livestream to oblivion! While this year’s event wasn’t quite as exciting as year’s past like in previous years where they revealed to us amazing in-house pre-release footage of DOOM 2016 or Fallout 4, we still got to see a pretty exciting clip of what DOOM: The Dark Ages is going to be all about. As usual, they made sure to walk the aisles and make sure nobody was filming the content and they were pretty proud that even after all of these years, no leaked footage from previous QuakeCon events has ever really been posted up online. Pretty cool in this day in age, actually!
In terms of the BYOC itself, it was about what you’d expect from previous years. Completely jam packed from one side of the room to the other with gamers, communities, friends all gaming together and just having some fun for a few days. I was there to experience it at its fullest capacity and the place is completely popping, to being the only one in the entire room within eyesight and it being completely freezing due to the lack of all of the body heat in the room! We had a group of about seven with us this time and we just all had some fun doing our own thing, although as a community we did play a lot of multiplayer games and even completed a few games at the convention like Mega Man II, Castle Crashers and the Trash Horror Collection!
The just-then released re-release of the DOOM & DOOM II collection was probably the biggest news out of the whole event, changing everybody’s copies of DOOM & DOOM II over to this new collection of games that features pretty much all of the old nostalgic DOOM you could ask for, including John Romero’s original SIGIL level set and a brand new, never before released wad developed by Nightdive Studios, which was pretty cool. We still have to play that, although I spent most of the time playing this to tackle ALL of the achievements on the Xbox version of this re-release, which was pretty easy due to the fact you can utilize cheats to get everything done!
At this QuakeCon, rather than just stick myself in the BYOC the whole time and play games, I was able to break away for a little bit and check out some of the other areas of the convention and see what else was going on. On the next floor above us, they had a tabletop village where people could borrow tabletop games and just have games to themselves. I actually noticed a tabletop board game of The Thing and Dead by Daylight which I thought would have been awesome if we had a larger group of the Croakitoad community there to have fun and experience it! The other really huge thing I noticed (and had to go look at) was the “Cat Cafe,” a room where you can go and deload and just chill with kitties all around the place. While my pictures don’t do it much justice, I was able to get a few pictures of the room to show what it was all about. The best part about it was that the Boba Tea table was setup in the same room, so they knew exactly what they were doing! The line to get in to Cat Cafe was super long, so I didn’t wait around to really get involved.
In terms of meeting new friendos at the event, I had a lot of fun checking out and meeting a lot of new gamers! I met the “DOOM Guy,” from Pennsylvania, who was attending his very first QuakeCon after having watched and seen footage from it for many years. He was able to finally come down with his dad and had the time of his life, getting pictures with Marty Stratton and other key figures from the DOOM community who were there. We were also able to hook up with a small community of people across the row from us who had been lucky enough to be sponsored by Alienware and didn’t have to bring any rigs at all. We played a few rounds of Golf With Your Friends and Fortnite with “killtheclownzz” and his fellow friends. I also met a fine couple who came around and asked for a few cans of my BAWLS that I had out on the table and I said sure! In return, they gave me a pretty awesome custom made BAWLS holder created by GameQraft, a gamer who is rising in popularity through the years from his 3D modeling and game character crafing models that he brings to the conventions each year.
Overall, I had a fun experience with friends and had a lot of fun. I would never turn down a chance to go to QuakeCon and just be able to chill out for a few days and play games as long as I want while surrounded by all of my fellow gamers and friends. I would definitely like to see more of the Croakitoad community get involved in this next year and get this group big and be able to experience the full scope of what QuakeCon really is. We could have a whole tabletop session, enter into some of the gaming tournaments and really take it to the next level! For now though, it’s been a really fun experience and I’m glad to have met so many of my friends through QuakeCon, especially Cygnified, who I’ve gotten to know personally over the years because of this event each year.
We’ll see ya next year, and hopefully we get some big news from the gaming world coming out of Bethesda, ID Software and Microsoft!
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