Brighton venue wins first inter-pub VR gaming tournament
As reported by The Morning Advertiser, Lost Rivers Brewing Co teamed up with The VR Concept to launch London’s only multiplayer virtual reality arcade, Gameboxx, within the brewer’s new Lost Rivers Elephant site, which held a launch event on 29 March.
Headlining the private launch event, attended by 200 people, was the first virtual reality gaming tournament between teams at the World’s End pub in Brighton, and London's new Gameboxx site.
After gamers from the Brighton site won on the night, The VR Concept’s co-founder Anthony Nixon expressed a desire to increase the number of sites involved – currently the company operates in three London sites and the World’s End in Brighton – and hold more regular tournaments.
"We are now looking to progress towards doing monthly tournaments culminating in an end-of-year final tournament. Our aim is to double in size within the next year – so we're looking at between four to six locations depending on availability.
"We're either going to try and expand further across London, into north or north-east London, however, we've got interest from the rest of the country as well – we're looking at a number of opportunities for expansion in the north, potentially Manchester."
Technical milestone
The tournament, which was comprehensively won by gamers from the Brighton site, involved five, six-minute, matches between four-person teams from each site.
Nixon added: "It was a fairly big technical milestone for us because we were independently streaming four computers from Brighton, and four from London, and then combining all of the feeds. Plus we had two live feeds, one from Brighton, one from London, at the same time.
"In essence, we were running a very basic television production. There were a lot of complexities. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth – we were chewing through the internet like there was no tomorrow.
"We've already got people requesting to sign up for memberships, asking when the next tournaments are and asking how we're going progress.
"It's definitely created a large amount of interest for bars. We're pulling customers in specifically to do the VR, the hope is that will translate to people buying drink and buying food.”
