Kongdoo StarzParty Experience

Sorry this is a bit late. My internet died for a couple of days so I didn't get a chance to work on this.

For those who don't know, I'm currently in Korea, on a 2 and a half month trip. I'm here visiting relatives, being touristy and playing video games. Early on in my trip, I looked around for any Starcraft 1 tournaments going on. Unfortunately, I caught a pretty dead time in terms of BW games. Luckily enough, Star Final 6 as it was called then, was announced. Unfortunately, only 350 people were to be accepted in a lottery. I signed up, hoping to get in.

I got in. =D

I live a bit to the southeast from Seoul, and it's around an hour and a half to Yongsan, were the event was held. The place is also known as an electronics sort of area. Lots of computer parts, phones, tablets, cameras, you name it. I'd been to the area a couple times before, and the previous trip, I had picked up this trinket for 12000 won (about 12 dollars).
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The figurines were out of my price range for the moment though. I'm hopefully going to grab a couple when I go to Akihabara in Tokyo in July.

The schedule for the day was to arrive at the place by noon to pick up a number which would be the order in which we lined up in later. I arrived around half an hour early so I decided to walk around and take pictures of the Gundam Base in the same building a couple floors down. They had probably every Gundam figure known to man but I just took a few pictures of the cool ones. The prices ranged from around 50000 won to well over 300000 (50-300+ bucks). There might have been some cheaper or more expensive ones but I didn't look at the prices too much.
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Gundam Guitars

Gundam Bike

Big Gundam.

One Piece

Goku =D

After that little detour, I looked at the mall map (which luckily had an english option) and found the E-sports Stadium as they called it. Top floor. I hated going up the escalators. Terrified of heights.

I found a couple of people grouped up in front of what I assumed were the venue doors and a line in front of a couple of Yellow shrines. That was actually what it looked like. There was some complicated Korean there too which I'm not too confident in reading so I'll leave them up to your imagination. I was also surprised by how many girls there were. Back in the NASL venues, 90% dudes. Here, there were I'd guess around 70% girls. I truly underestimated the celebrity culture here.

Sorry, most of the pictures are sideways. Imgur is weird.
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After around half an hour of waiting, the line started moving. Once it was my turn, I had to inform the person handing out the cards that my name was in english since I used my legal Korean name on my Canadian passport. I think mine was the only english name on the list so not too hard to find me at the top. Luckily, I got 52. Not bad at all.

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From then on, I had around 3 hours to kill as the fan-meeting was scheduled for 4:00. I went to the Lotteria to eat (Imagine Mcdonalds, but owned by the super Korean/Japanese company Lotte) and ordered myself a cheeseburger combo (or 'set' as they call it here). I then proceeded to watch anime while I ate. So lonely ;_;

Since that really only took an hour or so, I decided to head down to the big video game area nearby. The whole Yongsan area is connected to the mall/subway by a covered walkway that seems to be under a bit of construction right now but there's still a regularly traversed detour to the place.

The video game corner is hard to describe but look up Yongsan travel blogs and you'll find this place mentioned often. It's essentially an underground corridor with video game vendors on either side of you. They have a ton of old-school and new games/consoles, etc. Unfortunately, I have nowhere near the cash on hand for any of this so I just went ahead to the one anime merch stall still alive there. This was where I picked up my trinket earlier but there was nothing else that really caught my attention there so after a bit of browsing, I left.

On my way back I spotted this from the stairs up the walkway.
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And a quick trip around the model store area around the Gundam Base.
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Planes

Complete with Flight Attendants!

Canada represent!

Viggo Mortenson vs. King of the Dead

Wooden Ship Models.

Badass Turtle Ship

This one was huge. I'd say about 5 feet long.

Once I made my way back up to the stadium, the usher lined us up according to number. They had a pair of reporters going around asking questions with a video camera but unfortunately, I wasn't asked.
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This was the outside of the top floor. Nice little patio to relax on.

The lineup extended from inside to around this wall. We were double file and the cutoff point was 50 so I was right in front of the door.

The video camera interview dude.

After some more waiting (about an hour by my guess), we were finally let in. They gave us little goodies as we went through the door like macaroons, an iced coffee, a hilarious package of tissues and a fan. We were escorted to our seats pretty quickly but I got a quick snapshot of the OSL winners thingy thing on my way.
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I really wanted a good picture of this but we were rushed in and the place was dark during/after the games so couldn't get really good ones.

We got gifts! Inside the box are a half dozen macaroons. We also got an iced coffee and a pack of stickers with some quotes on them.

This was the pack of tissues we got XD.

Probably a reference to something but I didn't really get it.

I was pretty blown away by the studio. It wasn't huge or anything like the NASL venues in Toronto but it looked damned professional. The chairs were the cheap plastic ones but I didn't care at that point. Just looking at the place where I had watched countless streams of OSL happening, it was something else. I was pretty awed.
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The stage!

One of the 3v3 booths.

The other one

This monitor showed the live broadcast for a while but was turned around midway through the games =(

Now moving on to tablet quality pictures! Took inbetween games. The other side was too dark and I had no flash on my tablet =(.

This display shelf was beside the big OSL Winners one.

Dunno whose print this is.

THE GOLDEN MOUSE

After some more waiting, we got to the fan-meeting. Unfortunately, what I gathered was that it was already a bit behind schedule, so they just read fan-questions off of notes. I managed to capture a big chunk of the Q&A on camera. At that point, my phone and my tablet were reaching the end of their battery lives so I had to minimize their use once the games started. I still got a couple of snapshots but I figured most people would be able to watch the stream and enjoy it instead of seeing my crappy blurry pictures. If people want me to upload it, I can try to get the video of it onto youtube.
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They played on screen in between games. I think it was on stream too but I'm not sure. I know the Jaedong ad played in the stream too.

It was this sorta dinner discussion between the players on planning the event from what I gathered. They were discussing maps, what to play, and some other stuff I didn't catch.

And yes, I did manage to get on screen for a bit. I was a tad worried I wouldn't as I'm very average Korean in appearance and midway through, I also got worried that they wouldn't want my Hwaseung Jacket on screen since sponsorship issues and all that. Luckily, I got a half-decent message down on my tablet and I got the attention of the camera dude before my tablet ran out of batteries. I actually had to dismiss a 15% battery life warning right before the camera hit me. A close call.

After it all ended, there wasn't really a chance to interact with the players. I wanted at least Yellow and Nal_Ra's autographs on my jacket (Bisu, Sea, Reach and others had disappeared by the end of the first game) but it seems everyone was tired since it was past 10pm. Yellow came out again at the end just to greet his lingering (mostly female) fans but alack, alas, an autograph was not meant to be and he left after thanking everyone for coming and accepting a couple of gifts.
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When I left the studio, I went around to the outside roof to the elevators. There was a crowd of people at what I assume to be the back entrance of the studio. My best guess was that they were waiting for the players to leave to get autographs or something. I thought about staying but figured that if they didn't come back out on stage to meet the fans, they probably wanted to head home so I left.

It was a really fun experience. I wish I had some other english speakers to interact with as the korean girls around me were shy and didn't seem up for talking. I do wish there were more Starcraft 1 events but I might go watch some Starcraft 2 later. Just need to find out where the studios are. Also, anyone wants to meet up, shoot me a PM and we can go to an SC2 game or something together before I leave Korea.

Kongdoo StarzParty Experience

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