This weekend, Abu Dhabi gets its first video-gaming and pop-culture fan event, as the IGN Convention lands at the du Forum on Yas Island.
The show’s debut in the capital marks the culmination of a five-year journey, as Hitesh Uchil, director of IGN Middle East, explains. “Five years ago, my colleague, Abbas Jaffar Ali, and I started a website called Middle East Gamers,” he says. “It was the first website in the region to talk about video games. It was a community-based website and more than 50 people from around the region contributed articles to the site.
“For gamers in the region, it was a place to meet online and share their love for video games. To give these gamers a chance to meet in person, we created an event called GamesFest. It was meant to be a small gathering of a few passionate gamers – but we had an overwhelming response, with more than 1,000 people attending.”
The virtual seeds were sowed. Two years later, Middle East Gamers merged with IGN, the biggest video-games website in the world, to form IGN Middle East, and GamesFest evolved into the IGN Convention – a festival featuring the best of video games, movies and pop culture.
The first two IGN Conventions were held in Dubai, but this year the team felt it was time for a change.
“For the past two years, IGN Convention has been organised by the team at IGN Middle East,” Uchil says. “As the event continues to evolve, we decided we needed a professional events company to handle the event and, thankfully, Flash Entertainment stepped up to the task.
Original article by Chris Newbould
Continue reading at The National:
Video games and pop-culture set to collide as IGN Convention comes to Abu Dhabi
Comments
Facebook
Twitter
Contact
Elan.tv
Comments