Wow, what an incredible photo! This is the future...it's like straight out of a SciFi flick.

Welcome to Finland! :) I'm not familiar with the local gaming culture however, I am afraid. I know there's also Ropecon, but apparently it's at the same time as Assembly (whose bright idea was that?).

that is a truly amazing image. i want to go to Finland!

America's a melting pot, right? Let's adopt this. :)

All those times when I'm bored and think "Where can I go that's fun?" I'll think of that now, damn. I wouldn't even have to be doing anything, just sitting in that environment would bring some level of gratification.

Another major gaming-related event is the GameWorld expo. Unfortunately it takes place around November. Here's a pic from the 2001 event.

Silly side note - Nintendo's booth had GameCube cake on offer.

Ahh... Assembly. The first Assembly (in 1992) was organized in a school 200 yards from my home. 750 people there then. Nowadays there's over 4500 participants yearly so the school would be too small for the event...

If you like the photo, check out these too (taken by a friend of mine):

http://kaunis.to/archive/photos/assembly01/

Have fun over here! :)

The Helsinki demo-scene folks are the best - less interactive some of the time, maybe, but check out Tpolm.com (yes, The Planet Of The Leather Moomins), and Katastro.fi for their excellent shenanigans. There's some other good stealth Finnish developers too, like Housemarque of Transworld Snowboarding fame. Yay.

This sudden outburst is most likey caused by the lack of social interaction between people. I played games from about 1988 till 2002 before I just stopped, mainly because I preferred to play in Arcades where you could play against live people right there on the spot.

It the human interaction element + the game. Eventually, you want both. Thus the mass appeal of LAN parties - in this case a MegaLan party - due to the fact people now a days just stay home and play games alone. That doesn't apply to all, but a good portion.

btw, the picture does look a like a rave! Reminds me of when I went to see Cream '98 with Daft Punk. The glowin lights! Damn.

Actually, Assembly started as a demo party - people gathering to make and show computer art. It still is a demo party, too, and calling it a "Mega-LAN" really doesn't do it justice. Not only do you get a super-fast network and a lots of people playing games, you also get one of the biggest demo scene happenings and an all around extra-vaganza of computer art of all sorts.

Check out Assembly 03's combo-results and download demoes/games/music either from official ftp-server, scene.org's ftp-server or from edome.net's ftp-server (doesn't seem to have all entries). Especially check out demoes, and graphics and from scene.org's server you can find entries from older Assemblys too. When you're visiting Finland, any other cities beside Helsinki you're going to go to?

They have a few similar lan-partys in Sweden. Dreamhack is the largest lan-party in the world with 5000 people there. Haven't been there though.
Also many people see it more as a way of downloading loads of software and divx movies rather than gaming (at Dreamhack at least).

Assembly is the biggest one these days. There was over 5000 people '03