We woke up relatively late on Friday morning (around 7am or so) considering the doors to the convention center were opening at 10am. We figured we didn't really want to wait for hours on top of hours when we'd be let in at a reasonable amount of time if we got there later. It seemed like a good idea in theory (it meant we got to sleep in after being so busy the night before!) but when we made it to the convention center and actually saw the giant-humongous-seemingly-miles-long-line, we were wondering if we'd even see the opening ceremonies.
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| Oh, hello, long-ass line, nice to see you. Not really. |
The above picture shows where we were standing the day before (on badge pick-up day). Yeah, we walked for probably about 10 minutes before we made it to our final "waiting" place, which was another part of the Anaheim parking lot:
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| Same line :\ |
Since we weren't going anywhere anytime soon, we took some pictures of ourselves.
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| They're such BAMFs. |
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| Me and Mr. L with our nerd gear on |
I took a super quick video panaroma of all of the people that surrounded us (and this was only a fraction):
Also, apparently we had someone famous standing in front of us (you can see him on the video as the guy with the super long hair). He's George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, the vocalist for the band Corpse Cannibal. I honestly didn't know who he was since I'm not big on metal, but I guess we can at least say we saw a celebrity :D
After waiting a while the line finally started to move! As we exited the parking lot area, I turned around and saw just how many people were left behind us:
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| Lots of people! |
About fifteen or so minutes later we made it back to the spot we'd been at the day before during badge pick-up.
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| Almost to the entrance! |
And then we made it in!
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| We're here! |
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| Blurry pic of the doors we just walked in |
We didn't have any time at all to start looking around because we had to get to the giant room for the opening ceremonies. We found our CBC friends who had kindly saved some seats for us and we waited for the festivities to begin!
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| Waiting for the opening ceremony! |
The president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Morhaime kicked off the convention, welcoming us to Anaheim. Then the VP of Creative Development, the famous Chris Metzen, gave a passionate speech on what it means to be a "geek":
Immediately after the ceremony we stayed put in the hall to listen to a panel on Diablo III. Mr. L and Joe enjoyed it, but I was zoning in and out since I don't play the game! After the Diablo panel came the World of Warcraft Dungeons and Raids panel, which I enjoyed a little bit more.
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| Blizzard employees discussing WoW: Cataclysm dungeons and raids |
After the panels, the guys wandered off to play the new World of Warcraft expansion and Diablo III while I walked around and took pictures of the pretty sculptures and art.
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| Where the guys spent their time |
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| Where I spent some of mine! |
I was really impressed with the life-size sculptures they had around. The details were pretty amazing.
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| A character in World of Warcraft |
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| An orc on his wolf |
I was also impressed with the drawings they had on display for the art auction. I don't know if I would've purchased anything if we had the money; it would be interesting to have to explain what it was to all of our house guests!
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| Some of the art on display at the gallery/auction |
We spent the majority of the day getting our bearings and soaking in the atmosphere. We basically did whatever we wanted to do -- saw panels we wanted to see, played games, looked at the decor, etc. We all met back up for the big event of the evening, the costume/dance contest hosted by Jay Mohr and Kat Hunter:
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| Way better picture than I could have gotten of them! |
The contests were very entertaining, and the costumes were very elaborate! People put a lot of hard work into them and we could definitely tell.
Day one was a lot of fun, but it was really tiring! We were going to eat at P.F. Chang's after we were done for the day, but unfortunately the hour and a half wait told us it was time to drive back to Santa Clarita. So we ended up driving back, and on the way home stopped at this little institution some of you might have heard of:
Joe popped our In-N-Out cherries that night, and it was pretty good food! And with our bellies stuffed, we called it a night.
Up Next:
Previous Posts:
- BlizzCon 2010, Part 3: Badge Pick-Up Day
- BlizzCon 2010, Part 2: The Road Trip Begins!
- BlizzCon 2010, Part 1: Journey to the West Coast
[...] second day of BlizzCon actually didn’t happen all at the Anaheim Convention Center like on the first day; in fact, we spent at least four hours right in the middle of the Con at Downtown [...]
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