Birdie 24 in the year of 2014
Written by Concept-P
This year Birdie moved from its old home at Allians Hallen in Uppsala to Fyrishov. The new headquarters are much bigger and there is finally a decent sleeping area. The party was held starting the 29th of May and ending on June 1st 2014.
Birdie has been around now for 21 years, It may not make sense that it is now Birdie 24 since the party is only once per year, but the secret is that in the beginning it was so small and easy to manage that there were not so many visitors. Basically it was the organizers who got together. At that time it was possible to arrange the party twice per year. Which is what happened.
But anyhow! Here we are 21 years later and now have about 880 visitors with computer seats. And about another 1500 other visitors. Birdie is not like Dreamhack and is not even a company.
It is based on a non-profit organization with volonteers who do the work. The makes the atmosphere quite special and very cozy.
The Expo was new this year. Since there was more room, something had to fill the space. The solution? Have an Expo and invite anyone computer associated. For example the public library had a booth where they were talking about electronic books that they had. Confusion had a cosplay booth and of course one of the sponsors had a booth where they sold computer hardware.
Birdie is a combined party with both a Scene Zone and a Game Zone, which actually works quite welll. (Most of the time, there have been conflicts in the past. ;)) Since the two zones are separated there is a big difference.
At the previous location there were three sports areans that were used. Scene, Game and Party. Sports arenas are still used but now there are five of them. Scene, Game, Party, Expo and one is used for sleeping only. The soundproofing is quite good since noise cannot be heard outside each arena. Party Zone is just pumping music and demos allmost around the clock. Game Zone had their own stage but all their finals where on the main stage where the demos also where shown. Scene also had a little stage and a workshop area with a 3-D printer that anyone could use. Watch random clips from Birdie 2014 at youtube.
Since this was the first year at a new location, I was expecting some trouble. But to my surprise things went very smoothly. 200 Gigabit internet connection and each switch had 2 Gigabit uplinks to the core router and a wonderfull crew who did everything they could to make things good.
Visitors have proclaimed that it was nice there where a lot of music entrys. Scene kept it strong with lots of nice compos,
workshops about how to get started with the scene. Birdie noticed last year that there are a lot of people who make graphics and music but have never heard of the scene. New for this year was also a 3-D printing demo, where people could use the 3-D printer to create things.
Main focus was on GameDev with a cash prize of 50,000 SEK. The scene is what still keeps Birdie alive. Nice music and awesome demos. This year Fairlight released a new PC demo called Deform for example. And Wiklund competed in the tracked
music and streaming music compo’s. See the results at the end of this article and all releases will of course will be available from scene.org as soon as possible.
Wiklund, Fastbom and malmen all did livesets on the main stage which was really nice! (It will be possible to view clips from the live stream as soon as technically possible at http://birdietv.org.)
See you next year at Birdie or maybe some other scene party! (Edison perhaps?) Over and out!
Links related to this article
Birdie's official Facebook page
Birdie's website
Birdie 2014 Results