After a short ride on the subway, some walking over an abandoned place, we arrived at the place to be: disco Now & Wow in Rotterdam, Holland. This was the place where we'd spend the night playing videogames, drinking free beers, more gaming, eating free hotdogs, hamburgers, chinese food and taco's, some more gaming, and meeting fellow webmasters. This was the biggest and coolest party of the year: the Cube Club.

We arrived at 6.40 PM, and the party wouldn't start until 7 PM. Fortunately, there were some goodlooking Nintendo promo babes, and we didn't mind having a little chat with them while waiting. One girl was a bit sad though, cause she didn't know what 'gamers' were. She explained to me that she didn't work for Nintendo, she worked for some event organisation. So up to the next promo babe, who hopefully knew something more about Nintendo and videogames. That girl was the one who also gave us our press badgets and four consumption coupons, and just when we wanted to start a little conversation, more important things happened, the doors opened.

It seems we had arrived in heaven, GameCubes everywhere! There were over 50 GameCubes, all connected to big Panasonic TV's. The games that were available were:

Luigi's Mansion
Wave Race
Star Wars: Rogue Leader
SSB: Melee
Pikmin
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
Eternal Darkness
NBA Courtside 2002
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Extreme G-3
Batman
Bloody Roar
Dark Summit
ISS2
Crazy Taxi
Tarzan

Unfortunately, Nintendo only showed a video of Star Fox Adventures, and also one of Donald Duck's Quack attack.

Also, there were two bars, where you could get something to drink in return for one of your four consumption coupons. Food was also free and unlimited. You could fill your stomach with hotdogs, hamburgers, chinese food and taco's. Excellent quality.

Nintendo was also giving away GameCubes and GBA's. One possibility to win one of those was scoring as many balls in a basket in three minutes, while you were attached to the wall with an elsatic. The other possibility was sitting on a jetski, that kept turning around, trying to throw you off its back. The one who could stay on the jetski the longest or who scored the most points at the basketball game, would get a bill that he can change for a GameCuibe on May 3rd. The second place would get a GBA with Mario Advanced, and the 3rd place would only get Mario Advanced. The highest score with the basketball game was 70, while the longest time on the jetski was 9 minutes and 36 seconds. GameCube Europe's Gerben fell off the jetski already after 39 seconds...

A cool feature was that you could place your head inside a big GameCube box, where a picture of your head would be taken. Then you'd receive a print that allowed you to make a cube covered with your head. Very cool!

We also met several webmasters from Dutch websites like Gamecom.nl, Gameqube.nl, Cubezone.nl and upcoming website Cubeholland.

We talked for about 30 minutes with Nintendo Benelux Marketing Manager Frank Rittinghaus, who told us some very interesting details about the promotion for GameCube in Holland. More on that can be found here.

After four beers, three hamburgers, two hotdogs, one taco and one bucket of chinese food each, the show was over. We of course received a goodie bag at the exit, containing a GameCube promo CD, a Cube Club T-shirt and a Cube Club poster. That made us that we'll probably have to wait about 6 years before we'll be at such a cool event again, when a new Nintendo console launches.

Download a movie here (6.9 MB)

Thanks to message board member Roksx for the movie and the first three pictures!