Kode5, India’s first mega gaming event organized by Kreeda Games, was held over two days, the 21st and 22nd of this month. Dedicated and passionate gamers fought for top honours in three games viz, Counter Strike, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne and Dance Mela.
The sponsors for the Kode5 India event were peripheral manufacturers Logitech and MAAC. The event boasted of global sponsors like Corsair, Gigabyte and Cooler Master. Cooler Master used this opportunity to launch its latest cooling system here in India, even before they hit the U.S. markets.
The main purpose of this event, as the CEO of Kreeda, Mr. Quentin Staes-Polet explained was to get the gamers of India together and to put them on the world map. Like he stated, right now gamers in India are playing in isolated packets across the country and events like Kode5 get them together to compete against their peers and see for themselves where they stand in a national setting.
The screening process to identify India’s best gaming team or ‘clan’ as it was termed for this tournament was a tedious process. It involved an online contest that saw over 2000 gamers registering. Out of these 2000, 8 clans were selected to battle it out in the grand finale held across these two days for each game.
The first day i.e.: the 21st saw 400 participants registering and giving the organizers a field day to contain the chaos. From the 400 walk-in registrations, two clans were selected making it a grand total of ten clans that battled it out in a knock out format. Clans from Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Pune and Mumbai were seen in action on the final day of the tournament.
Sagar Vaishnav walked away with the top prize in Warcraft III and clan ATE won the Counter Strike event thus gaining the opportunity to make India proud. Other than winning cool peripherals from Logitech and Cooler Master, these winners will be flown to Moscow to match their skills, wits and temperament in ‘World Final’ that takes place on the 9th of May this year. The upcoming world finals will have clans from 25 countries battling it out to be the top gamers in the world.
Dance Mela, a social networking site and brainchild of Kreeda, attracted many contestants too. Not just that, it was remarkable as this game combined the virtual and the physical world. It was strange for some of the participants as they have spoken to their counterparts only in the virtual world before.
The ambience at the event reflected that of a war zone and the games were telecast live through Kreeda servers to a global audience. For the gamblers dormant in the gamers, a betting zone was in place complete with odds handed out for each team. This made the tournament even more interesting and exciting than it already was.
The live action was also telecast on ten monitors in the hall so as to not disturb the players while they were playing. A very novel thought as the participants could concentrate only on their game and not have a crowd distract them from the task at hand. The Logitech stall had two terminals put up where the spectators and participants could take a breather from the action and try their hands at Call of Duty II.
From the looks of it the event was a major success and Sukamal Pegu, from Kreeda, promises this to be a yearly event with even more thrills to look forward to next year. One of his major plans is to install a heartbeat monitor to understand and view the emotions that a gamer is going through while playing his favourite game. Even if the heartbeat monitor is not commissioned, gamers will be hoping with all their heart that these kinds of tournaments are organized on a regular basis so that we don’t have just one band of Boys in Blue making our country proud.
–Ajay Dsouza (Mumbai)