As you may be aware, we recently sailed across the big blue sea (well, flew on a plane) to Cologne, Germany to show off Dance Central Spotlight at the biggest European gaming convention: Gamescom!
If you’ve never been to Gamescom, it’s a tough one to explain. It’s the biggest gaming convention Harmonix attends, possibly the biggest convention on the Earth. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of attendees navigating the biggest and loudest booths to be found. It also has the longest hours of any convention we attend. Did we mention there are hundreds of thousands of people attending?
If this seems daunting, it was. But still we braved the masses to make sure the people of Europe could get a glimpse of Dance Central Spotlight before it launches in just a few short weeks! On Tuesday, we hosted a kiosk at Xbox’s Play Day and evening community event which followed their Press Conference, to make sure Microsoft fans got a chance to dance.
Wednesday of Gamescom is a full day of media access, so we made sure our kiosk was open and ready for business. And our kiosk space was so nice! We had a nice little living-room style space in the Xbox booth, right beneath their Livestream space. And we had couches! We never have couches! It was also a nice little nook away from the chaos of the show floor where you could relax, dance a bit, and listen to “Happy" by Pharrell Williams over and over and over again.
Thursday the show began in earnest and for the next four days we, along with two local staffers named Valentina and Ricardo, helped a steady stream of attendees get their dance on with Dance Central Spotlight.
We also ran two stage shows a day on Xbox’s demo stage. I’d get up, say a little bit about the game, show off my dance moves with either Annette or Valentina, and then the dance competition began. The Xbox stage hosts Nikki and Bjørn would call up two dancers each, who’d compete two at a time and then winner vs. winner for ultimate victory. Each competitor got an Xbox prize pack, and the ultimate winner got some stuff that I’m sure was awesome, though since the prize was given in German and my German is a bit limited, I couldn’t tell you what it was! I also don't have any pictures of them because I was onstage the whole time. oops!
The best parts of these stage shows always came at the end. The final dance off song was what quickly became clear was the song of show, Avicii’s “Wake Me Up”. So that’s what the Winner v. Winner dance battle would be, and we’d get the crowd singing and clapping along.
Of course, it wasn’t all work, no play. When we weren’t working on mastering every move in Dance Central Spotlight, we found time to goof off a bit, like in the nearby photobooth. We love photobooths!
We had a lot of people playing a Dance Central game for the very first time, which is always fun at shows because people tend to go from being a bit shy and uncertain to SO happy and excited to play another song. German, French, English, American, we all just love to dance!
And, when finally the show ended Sunday night, we swam our way through the piles of trash to return to the hotel and pack up.
Another year down, Gamescom! Big thanks to Valentina and Ricardo for helping myself, Nick, and Annette show off Dance Central Spotlight!
