GRLan Party organizes massive LAN gaming conventions. Assuming you have your own computer and games chosen for a convention, bring your equipment and play! They're based out out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Around since 2000, you can get tournament and convention information, as well as user forums and media at http://www.grlanparty.com. For overnight events, a guardian must sign a waiver if you're under 18. For a one-day event, people under 16 need the waiver signed.

I interviewed GRLan Party's Megan Schoenherr.

Andy: What are your most popular games right now? Have there been any interesting trends or changes in types of games people are playing?

GRLan Party: As for the most popular games out right now. About every 3-4 months that changes, except for 2 games really. Those 2 gamed would be Counter-Strike Source and the Battlefield Series. Otherwise almost as fast as the hype is drawn up about games, is just as fast as they die. Some other big ones right now would be Quake 4, F.E.A.R., and MMORPG's (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.) Everyone is awaiting the release of Crysis, a sequel to the hit game FarCry.

Andy: Your website lists the Lansing location as the primary meeting place. Do you plan any Grand Rapids-based events?

GRLan Party: Our last event was in Lansing, but it was the first event that we have held outside of Grand Rapids. It was a co-hosted event with another LAN group from Lansing, and they already had the facility lined up. So we are still based out of Grand Rapids.

Andy: Last year's article had this quote about GRLan Party: "it has expanded from tiny gatherings in hotel conference rooms to large-scale, convention-style events, the biggest of which drew 90 players". Looking at past events, I see a recent event drew 200+ players. Has the player count been consistently growing?

GRLan Party: As for the quote from last year's article about us growing, that still remains true! We have nearly doubled our size with every event that we have thrown. Our last event drew in 260 gamers on one of the worst weather days of the year. Had the weather been good, we estimate that 300 would have attended! That event landed us the title of the Largest LAN Party in Michigan since 2003. We plan on holding onto that title with our future events! ;)
Video gaming is becoming more and more popular, but you need to give the gamers a reason to come to your events. With the right sponsors, the right tournaments, and a great LAN staff to make the event run smoothly..you can do anything that you want. We have expanded from just doing computer gaming and have started to hold console gaming tournaments (xbox, playstation, and gamecube) to draw in different kinds of gamers.

Andy: How would you describe your popularity since a year ago?

GRLan Party: Since last year our popularity has grown greatly. We were seeing all of the same people all of the time and pulling in around 60 attendees on a regular basis with a maximum of 90 attendees. We didn't just randomly get bigger and more well known though. We decided that we WANTED to be bigger. We did a complete re-haul of our look. We changed our logo and our colors to be more appealing and we hit the advertising very hard. We took a great deal of time to work with several of our sponsors, to provide us with bigger and better prizes and to help draw in more gamers. We developed a mascot, which is a Chicken and we had a contest to give him a name (his named is Kernel Cluck. Kernel is a computer term.) We also added a few people onto our staff to make things run a little smoother at the events (this was also needed to compensate for our growing size too.) Now we are drawing in not only new faces from all over Michigan, but we regularly see people coming in from out of state (Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Canada mostly.)

Andy: How frequent are events?

GRLan Party: We are currently in the works of planning another event, though I do not have an exact date. I can tell you that we are shooting for this July and we are going to make it an even bigger, and even better event than before! People should just keep checking the website for details, we post them as we get them.

Andy: What have you learned in running the business? Any big success stories you could share?

GRLan Party: I've learned a lot just from the Marketing standpoint of GRLan Party. I am currently a marketing student and so doing this actually helps me a lot with my degree. It is amazing how much work has to go into something like this and how many different marketing area's you have to hit. LAN Parties could be one of the hardest things for anybody to advertise honestly. How do you get information about your event to people that play video games. It's not really something you can put a flier in the convenience store and just hope that they will read it. You wouldn't be successful then.

Andy: Any big problems you didn't realize you'd have? Any unforeseen hurdles you've had to overcome?

GRLan Party: I think that most of the GRLan Party crew has learned that a budget is very important. You have to make sure that you can cover your expenses. We've started setting up a budget at the very beginning of our event planning, and make sure that we don't go over even by a penny. Throwing LAN events is not cheap and working with a budget makes everything run more smoothly and creates a lot less tension in the group while planning if you lay everything out ahead of time.

We also started using ALP software (Autonomous LAN Party - http://www.nerdclub.net/alp) at our events. It's a fully customizable LAN based intra-net site. We customize it to the GRLan Party look and have to set up a special server to run it at the LAN, but it is worth the work! It makes tournament management and just getting info out to all of the gamers a lot easier. You can put your whole LAN Party schedule in it and put in a tech support section. The bigger your event is, the better this software is for you. It seriously has cut our work almost in half.

Andy: If you had all the money you needed to work on one aspect of your business (things like marketing, expanding gaming into another area, developing a new interface, a new type of game, or just beefing up your equipment), what would it be?

GRLan Party: If I had all of the money needed to work on one aspect of GRLan Party...haha. Honestly what I would do, and I'm pretty sure what any LAN Party organizer would do, if we had a bunch of extra money: Buy all of the equipment needed throw the biggest LAN we possibly could. But if I had to use it just on one aspect of GRLan Party, I would probably beef up the equipment so it was faster and we could support more gamers.