Austin, TX: Cradle of Gaming (weirdness, sometimes)
Two things come from Texas: one of them’s got horns, and one of them apparently is video gaming.
Or else why would MTV’s Gamer’s Week 2.0 send Sway Calloway and MTV News’ Stephen Totilo off to Austin to do a feature for, well, gaming? Austin is, as MTV finds, home to Dell, the University of Texas in Austin (one tricked out college for gaming and gaming purposes), the Austin Game Conference, NCSoft’s Richard Garriott (daddy to Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa), a Midway Games branch, and the Halo-machinima “Red vs. Blue” producers Rooster Teeth.
All that gaming… je ne sais quois in one city… it’s bound to produce some degree of craziness that MTV’s dying to report on. (We sense a future Punk’d episode idea here.)
You’ve got Richard trying his hand out in amateur archaeology (his home’s full of relics and stuff) and – God forbid – rap music. Visit the Austin Midway Games branch and you’ll find whiteboards for brainstorms-while-walking everywhere (why not make them wall-to-wall?), and Razor scooters for in-house transportation (better make those “brainstorms-while-scooting…”). There was an idea for fire poles to make leaving second-floor meetings more fun, but that didn’t make it past the drawing board. Aww.
And a lot of the gamers here, apparently, are killer. One local FPS clan fought against a New York-based clan, “basically fed them (the New Yorkers) their own tonsils”. Alrighty, these are guys we definitely do NOT want to underestimate in any future multiplayer matches.
You do know that the unofficial motto of Austin is “Keep Austin Weird”, right? Now, if we could find some Tauren out in the fields. Because they got horns, you know…
Two things come from Texas: one of them’s got horns, and one of them apparently is video gaming.
Or else why would MTV’s Gamer’s Week 2.0 send Sway Calloway and MTV News’ Stephen Totilo off to Austin to do a feature for, well, gaming? Austin is, as MTV finds, home to Dell, the University of Texas in Austin (one tricked out college for gaming and gaming purposes), the Austin Game Conference, NCSoft’s Richard Garriott (daddy to Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa), a Midway Games branch, and the Halo-machinima “Red vs. Blue” producers Rooster Teeth.
All that gaming… je ne sais quois in one city… it’s bound to produce some degree of craziness that MTV’s dying to report on. (We sense a future Punk’d episode idea here.)
You’ve got Richard trying his hand out in amateur archaeology (his home’s full of relics and stuff) and – God forbid – rap music. Visit the Austin Midway Games branch and you’ll find whiteboards for brainstorms-while-walking everywhere (why not make them wall-to-wall?), and Razor scooters for in-house transportation (better make those “brainstorms-while-scooting…”). There was an idea for fire poles to make leaving second-floor meetings more fun, but that didn’t make it past the drawing board. Aww.
And a lot of the gamers here, apparently, are killer. One local FPS clan fought against a New York-based clan, “basically fed them (the New Yorkers) their own tonsils”. Alrighty, these are guys we definitely do NOT want to underestimate in any future multiplayer matches.
You do know that the unofficial motto of Austin is “Keep Austin Weird”, right? Now, if we could find some Tauren out in the fields. Because they got horns, you know…
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