At Expo there was undoubtedly going to be some stands that drew larger crowds than others. While we were there it became quite clear that the winner in terms of crowd appeal and interest from press and general public alike was the SteelSeries one. This booth featured a nice lounging area of “Fatboy” bean bags, a few racks of mouse mats, several foam heads sporting the legendary Steelsound and Icemat headsets and the centrepiece, two gaming rigs hooked upto a large monitor with a pro gamer on one, and all challengers on the other. The prize for taking down one of these SteelSeries sponsored gamers was a headset of your choice; well we just had to give it a go.
Naturally we got our asses firmly handed back to us, but I think sticking our viewpoint on a big monitor for these “Pro” gamers to quickly peak out was a little biased.
Leaving with a little bit of pride left, we decided to check out the nearby stand of a Mr Stephen Walsh, head of Meroncourt, one of the UK’s largest peripheral distributors and Razer’s and SpeedLink’s front man for this show. Having 4 booths to run (Razer, SpeedLink, Anycom, Sitecom) kept him busy for a while so we wandered around snapping pictures of the stands that he and his team were manning.
Returning to the Razer stand for a couple of extra pictures we were met by Mr Walsh who amiably introduced us to the newly arrived Razer crew. They were people of few words but we got the gist that they liked our review of the DeathAdder and wanted us to continue our great work; or something like that.
Next we were introduced to the lovely Kathrin Bachmann who was interested to hear that we had reviewed her Medusa headset in the past. Hopefully we can work more with them in the future.
Steve showing his good side
By this point we were drifting back towards the SteelSeries stand for another crack at those pesky pro gamers, but we decided to stir up a bit of mischief too. It needs to be said that Steve Walsh and John Sage of Steel Series are rivals of sorts and Mr Sage is not a big fan of Razer products as they conflict with the SS brand. Being the gits that we are, we borrowed a Death Adder from Steve and sidled over to the SteelSeries booth with our gaming edge firmly in hand.
Needless to say we got our asses firmly kicked again, but we did get some pictures of a Death Adder sitting snugly in the SS booth. Apparently if pictures of this got online John said he would post pictures of Mr Walsh wearing a horses head; we shall see what the aftermath of this article is.
Other products on show with the Razer lot were their new keyboard, the Tarantula (Which we managed to pry from Steve’s hands on the second day), some posters of their upcoming 2.1 speaker set, the Mako and a few kits of their Pro-Tones headphones.
