Woah. I’m still a little in shock over XCOM. If you can measure success by numbers, we did extraordinarily well – over 1000 people turned up. There were queues outside before eleven, and they had to stop people from coming in for a while in the afternoon.
I’ve been wanting to be a part of something like this ever since I dragged Lee Felsenstein for lunch years ago, and talked with him about putting together all the different tribes of geekdom. It was a little unsettling seeing it take off so close to my face, though.
At the end, Dave and I did one of our standard schticks we’ve done at previous NTK Live shows. It felt very different. Those older shows were pretty clearly meetings for fans of NTK – and this was something much much bigger. Who were these people banging on about an ASCII e-mail when there were giant BBC Microcomputer art-robot video installations machines ridden by WiFi-wielding teenagers dressed in clothes they’d made themselves out of origamid loyalty cards to talk to? Even Dave, who (with the excellent mute posse), pretty much single-handedly organised much of the show, seemed a bit dwarfed by the magnitude of what he’d done. It was all about five times bigger, and ten times weirder than I’d ever imagined it to be.
And of course the irony is that I was rushing around so much, I didn’t actually see much of it. If want to know what it was like, check out the coverage by Cory and Tom Coates and Neil McIntosh. There are some photos too!