August 27 2018 – What started off as an idea to create a celebration of gaming in Toronto culminated with the amazing CNE Gaming Garage Powered by AMD that just wrapped up.
Over 150 gaming PC’s, tens of thousands of dollars of prizes, classic arcade cabinets and pinball machines, esport professionals and casual PC game systems were all on display this past weekend. Many people got to experience Virtual Reality gaming for the first time and of course every PC in the hall was powered by AMD systems featuring Radeon GPUs and Vega CPUs.
The 3 days the event spanned really ranged in weather from glorious sunshine to heavy rain but Hall F at the Enercare Center was always full from 10am to 10pm. We ran into gamers that traveled from New York and Quebec just for this event and many young gamers got to try their first real gaming PC. There were Dance Dance Revolution games as well as Jackbox Tv pop up tournaments. In short there was something for every type of gamer (even board games on the top level of the hall).
I actually work at AMD for my full time job (note – this article is not being written with that hat on) and was able to see the event being put together by many people that work at the company from day one. Quite simply our intention was to give Toronto a celebration of gaming which is exactly what happened. Many volunteers worked countless hours to provide a world class gaming hall unlike any other our city has ever seen. This was truly a labor of love and we hope to be able to do it again.
The single most memorable moment for me though was being fortunate enough to play with my 9 year old son on a true LAN environment for the first time ever and totally got schooled by him on Fortnite. Having spent many hours at LAN events throughout my 20 year career at AMD there really was nothing cooler than to let my son experience the thrill of gaming in a hall with many other gamers and seeing his smile when he would outrank me (every single time).
We did hear that many people came to the CNE mainly for this event, and we made sure everyone had a chance to do some gaming and walk away with some swag (thousands of pop sockets were passed out along with some VR kits, GPU’s and even full gaming PC’s).
We leave you with some photos of the event.
