It’s a cold night in ancient Jönköping. This morning I arrived for the third time at an event called Dreamhack, a festival like no other. The first time, I introduced why I had to go there. The second time proved it wasn’t just a lie. This time became even more epic. Let me take you through the journey we’ve had so far.
It’s a grey wednesday afternoon in the Netherlands. I received a call, my buddy and taxi driver for the occasion had arrived next to my home. My feet started tapping, my fingers ticking, my mind goes into instant party mode, and the rest of the body…. Well, Sweden doesn’t need an intro to what’s happening in other regions.
The bus arrives. We load our gear into it. Shake hands, fingers and toes with the known and the unknown that will be part of this journey. Let’s zoom into the sixteen hour bus ride. Friends, strangers and my mom always wonder why I agree to be in a bus for so long. Well let me explain what happens when you get in a bus with a bunch of gamers, photographers, video-editors, cosplayers and alcoholics.
For this trip I came up with a five mission existing campaign:
- Mission 1: Get into Germany.
- Mission 2: Get drunk.
- Mission 3: Get to a boat.
- Mission 4: Sleep.
- Mission 5: Enter DreamHack as sober as a man with a hangover can be.
So mission one is easy and for everyone achievable. The anonymous bus driver takes you there. But it’s very important to prep for the second mission. Good gear never lets a soldier down. By now everyone has a similar ritual. There is only one single checkpoint at Oldenzaal, so you shall need some focus, otherwise mission two is going to fail.
Mission two is the key ingredient to surviving the bus trip. Since alcohol attacks the short time memory, one can’t remember for how long he is in the bus. So sixteen hours become party hours and since sixteen hour parties are way too long without the harder spectrum of medication, we forget the time. At a certain point you’ll end up playing card games, sing Dutch karaoke, do some arm-wrestling, shoot some dice, and try to get to know the unfamiliar faces.
Somewhere in the middle of this mission there are some checkpoint. Even one where the driver is replaced with Barry. This man deserves all the credit for getting these legends all the way from the Netherlands into the cold of Sweden. It is this man who gets you to achieve the key objective in Mission three, the first boat. At this point the men are separated from the boys. When you are too drunk, you will fall off the boat. When you are still sober enough to come up with business plans and start a new joint venture with a streaming celeb, you’re right on the right track not to mess up mission five.
At the boat, prepare some more for the stay in Sweden. Some stuff is not that expensive here compared to Sweden, so when you’ve forgotten something, get it now. Mission four is the one I love most. Get next to someone in the bus who is getting to sleep as well. Make sure you don’t have any annoying people around you, or make them behave. There are solutions for this, which I tell/sell only off the record.
Make sure to have a pillow, a blanket and some duct tape. Ventilation holes are your worst enemy here. Make them shut up. Silence is key. Cuddle up to your partner in sleeping crime and you won’t even notice there is a second boat. I’ve never seen the first part of Sweden due to a special set of flawless techniques which I acquired over some years. Then there is a time to wake up. Waking up without a hangover is the first checkpoint. Achieved this one on the quiet mode, people will get back to you in later stages when you want a nice piece of rest.
At some point Barry will start screaming in your ear, this is the moment of celebration. You have survived the first sixteen hours of Intel Pack4DreamHack. I’m sure there are some other techniques to get there but this one is most convenient for me. At this time the doors open. DreamHack says: “You shall not consume alcohol beyond this point.” Which is no problem at all. Slightly hung over and a bit of a physical wreck a man doesn’t want to think about alcohol here.
So DreamHack starts… The beautiful women are still here / here again. The smell of the worst fast food a man can image is present too. Wood, electricity and network plugs all there. Let’s start phase two of the party. Everyone can do here literally what you want to do here. For all the details on this, contact my secretary and I’ll come and explain. Every year I want to do something new. Something I know the existence of, but never did before, never new shit about, never thought I would be doing it.
This edition I had my very first live MC-gig. Of course I’ve done some crazy singing in a bar, was a DJ for some years in a local international Student Pub, but performing in front of, what could be twenty thousand people with only a mic and my dancing “skills” was beyond that. Way beyond that. Mister bigmouth said ok to the plan. So I stuck to it. A few hours before this was happening I started to get really nervous. I think it must have been since my swimming exam twenty years ago I was this nervous. There we were, on stage, Dixz did his thing and I tried mine. I fought through the power hour. I survived. It wasn’t the best DreamHack had ever seen. For sure it was better than that DJ, doing the MCthing himself with some papers….
The next day. Time for a ritual: get into Jönköping Nightlife. This became one of the most legendary night out in Sweden. Not because of the booze, not because of the girls, but because of the live performance four Dutchman can give a square of locals into Dutch musical history and football anthems.
After some hangover time – I thought I was through it, pictures prove different – we went back to the event to watch some proper CS:GO.One of the best matches I’ve ever seen in my life with a bit of an anti-climax on the end. Seeing the Swedish Ninja’s lose to a bunch of Frenchies hurt like losing the World Cup to the Spanish.
This night is different than the others, since it’s the last one for this edition. So no sleeping until your ass is on the bus. There are quite some techniques to achieve this. I still haven’t found the perfect way. Someday I’ll come up with a guide for this. Time to get our gaming shoes on and try to rock some games. And we did. Without losing a single match we became Tournament Champions offline C&C Generals Zero Hour. Unfortunately no price money, taking the pride and glory was more than we could have wished for. After the glorious moments of victory, time to shower.
This is crucial to have people surrounding you in the bus. Since there are only limited areas you can go, please do not feel free to do this, just do it. Arriving in the bus. Setup your sleeping pod for the next couple of hours. The mission for the way back is simple: Eat, Sleep, Shit, Repeat. Fall asleep and dream your DreamHack a nice and beautiful goodbye. After a couple of hours you’ll wake up and realize that second boat people told you about is really there. It does exist. Stating the fact, memorize it, fall asleep until the next one.
Arriving on the next boat you already know what to do. Just keep doing this until some of the packers leave. At that point you know you’re back in our beloved country, or in the one next to it. At this point there are two ways stuff can go down, last year we did some proper karaoke, this year we did it with something with corks. For next time I would suggest some corky karaoke, we’ll see how that will end up.
At this point, approx. 24hours after arriving in Newjoke, I look back to a marvelous edition of Intel Pack4DreamHack. Which isn’t only the DreamHack experience. It’s an epic journey, to and from the event. I heard some voices saying they would rather go by plane or with their own car.
I can say without a doubt, I might try that someday but for now, there hasn’t been a single edition where I didn’t enjoy the ride. For now I want to thank in a total random order: Three Legends, The Puzzle Man, The Drinking Buds, The Video Crew, The Streamer, The Shooting Champions, The Belgians, The Prizewinning Cosplayers, The Man With 9 Fingers, The Guys I Should Have Played Worms With, The Shower Snail Miracle and all of you who we hadn’t had the time to make history with.
– Thys te Poele – 
