Once again Crusaders, this time in cooperation with Exile (PC), held The Gathering in Lillestrøm/Norway. This time Magbox were there to cover the event. Read on to see how it all went. Gliding in... Most of the people who were present at The Party 1992, will probably get bad vibrations if we mention the word QUEUE (Whoops, easy now..). Anyway, this time the organizers didn't even seem to know the word. When I arrived at about 10.30 there wasn't even anything that looked like a queue. At THE PARTY 1992, there was queues even 12 hours after the whole thing started... Very nice organized on this point indeed. The place Skedsmohallen is as mentioned in the invitation, one of Norway's largest sports halls and it sure looked like it when you entered the hall itself. Skedsmohallen is located not too far from the center of Lillestrøm, but as Lillestrøm didn't seem to offer the greatest deal of entertainment, that didn't matter. When it came to sleeping places it was actually not bad at all. There was some good places to sleep around the place, but unless you were able to sleep with at least ten hardhitting loud speakers pumping tekkno around the clock, you couldn't sleep in the hall itself. Eating... Everybody have to eat some time and the was of course a cafeteria for the hungry souls. Unfortunatly this cafeteria didn't really offer a lot. A pizza, a sausage with a pankake and a couple of other things. Not really a lot, but the pizzas were in my oppinion very good (Hey, this ain't the kitchen corner.-ed). There was also a kiosk where you could buy coke, chips and some chocolate. Both the cafeteria and the kiosk offered Coke, Fanta, Sprite etc. in some big cups containing one liter of cold Coke (or whatever) and they were even refuelable, very nice indeed. This is a MUST for any other parties in the future... The persons As far as I've been told, about 1500 people attended to The Gathering '93. It was quite a mixture of all kinds of people. I must admit that I didn't really see a lot of the more known groups as I had expected and the number of peeople fro example Finland wasn't very big. I have to admit that the impression I got was that there were a lot of lamers or whatever one might call it these days. Anyway, I also met a lot of my friends so generally I was very satisfied. Unfair graphics jury In the graphic competition there wasn't really a lot of pictures, but the ones there was very nice. A bad thing though was that the organizers refused to show some pictures by Toastmaster of MOVEMENT and Xience of MELON DEZIGN. The picture by Toastmaster was much like the one he had used at The Party 1992, but the organizers didn't seem to find it one bit amusing to use it. Overpowered sound gear 14 modules had been selected by a jury, and they were to be played. It was quite obvious in one particular case that the jury had simply selected the module just because of the name of the composer. And what was worse, the module got a nice position. The equipment used for playing the tunes, was very powerfull. Perhaps too powerfull. In my opinion, a lot of the module was really ruined because of the way the organizers had set it. The whole gear was simply set to play techno and not normal music. This made a lot of the modules extremely lousy to listen to, except the techno ones. Really lame! The competions in general The waiting time between the different competitions was totally lame, it would have been better if they had just shown them quite fast after eachother. The 15 minutes were far too much. Really bad organized, but if you read the interview with the organizers you will find that they have an excuse... It seemed that some contributions hadn't been checked, since the Enigma II demo from PHENOMENA did not have ANYTHING to do with PHENOMENA at all. It was just some kind of nazi commercial. FUCK those brainless lamers and let them burn in hell!!!!! (The nazis that is!) The voting system The voting was this time on paper, but quite nice arranged anyway. The vote sheets weren't spread before the maeterial to be presented had been selected. That way, the only thing one had to do when voting was to mark the thing you wanted to vote for and then deliver it with the number on your wristband. VERY clever actually, and a nice comfortable way to vote. Black outs I believe that the power supply could have been a LOT better. The place where I were sitting, the power dropped out QUITE a number of times. In general the power could have been better arranged. It looked very unsafe the way it was set up, this was really an annoying part of the party. Global trash... As I beleive it was last year, this years Gathering also looked like a dump in the end. There didn't seem to be any cleaning service, but at least nobody had the amusing idea of throwing pizzas this time. Instead of that, a lot of pizza plates were thrown around... They were flying quite good, but they were't one bit of fun getting in the neck. The toilets weren't exactly luxury, infact, they were QUITE discusting all though they were cleaned from time to time. The party in general The Gathering '93 was my 4th big party and I have to say that it was one of the better I've been to. As mentioned, the sleeping conditions were okay. The organizing was on most points excellent except for the delays during the demo competition. The whole organizing staff were very helpfull and had at the same time things under total control. Everywhere you looked there was a screaming yellow shirt. I believe this prevented any bigger problems, except in the end where some things was stolen, but that ALWAYS happend at parties this big. The conclusion must be that this years Gathering defintly was worth attending, NICE WORK!