We are very excited to announce that the Insomnia Gaming Festival will be moving to a new home at the Telford International Centre, Shropshire! We have been working hard to ensure this is the right move for the future of the Insomnia festival, and after a very in-depth consultation with our customers we have decided that Telford is where the future lies for our flagship event.
The ability to host over 3000 gamers, a more central location in the UK and awesome amenities are just some of the benefits it offers! The move to Telford will start with the upcoming i43 Summer event.
Early Bird Extended – 20% Off!
To celebrate this move and the higher capacity we are extending our Early Bird 20% discount to the end of May and removing the cap on how many tickets will be sold at this discount. This gives 2 weeks for as many people as possible to grab a cheap ticket to what is arguably going to be the most important event in the history of the i-Series!
The New Venue
We have been looking at venues to take the i-Series forward and whilst Newbury is great and we love it to bits, we are struggling to grow the i-Series there. To this end we have been working hard to find a venue that will allow us to continue to grow the i-Series, whilst providing you with all the services you need to make it a great event.
Earlier this year the management team here at Multiplay visited the Telford International Centre, a family-owned venue just above Birmingham on the M54; quite central in the UK. They are very keen to have the i-Series events at their venue, and we were all very impressed with what they had to offer.
Essentially if we were building a venue for LANs from scratch, it wouldn’t be far off this! It has a very similar feel to Stoneleigh park in terms of large halls, but with all the amenity, catering and transport problems fixed.
Venue Headlines
- The two main halls can accommodate 3000+ gamers (Hall1+2 on plan)
- Room to expand to many more across additional halls and floors.
- Separate hall for exhibition, stage, Turn Up and Play (TUP) and also a chill-out/rest area for attendees (Hall 3).
- Travel: Centrally located 5 minutes off the M54 motorway. Excellent rail and air links. Within 2.5hrs drive of the majority of the UK population. Free shuttle bus from rail station.
- Accommodation: 3 on-site hotels with preferential rates, including a Holiday Inn. 77 acre camp site right next door (free with BYOC). Hostel-style accommodation with some 400 beds a 5 min shuttle bus away.
- Amenities: Right next to the town centre. Shopping centre, ice rink, bowling alley, cinema, restaurants all right by.
- 2000 on-site parking spaces.
- 1 Gbps internet connection.
- Airy, well ventilated halls.
- Catering: All done in house to high standards. Used to competing with nearby take aways + restaurants due to location, so good pricing too. Return of the central OMM NOM NOM tuck shop
- Luxury Clanboxes available!
Double-Edged Sword
We know that this change of venue will come as bad & good news to some of our customers. Many had already made plans for i43 being at Newbury, and so we are working hard to ensure that our customers do not lose out as a result of the move. We are really sorry that we will have disappointed some of you, especially with this announcement coming after tickets had gone on sale.
However, with the problems we encountered at Newbury and the potential of a 1600 player cap, we simply could not accept a step back for our biggest event. We have received overwhelming support for this move from the community through the forum poll and the survey responses from over half of the paid up attendees.
Many thanks to all of you who took the time to give us your feedback. We hope that you will continue to support the event and we honestly believe it is the right thing for the i-Series, the attendees and the scene as a whole.
However, if you have already bought a ticket to i43 and are unable/unwilling to come to Telford, you can of course cancel and get a complete refund on your ticket. Furthermore, if you have already booked a hotel room or travel for i43 that will not allow you to get a refund, we will endeavour to help you, either to provide a replacement for Telford or look to compensate as a gesture of goodwill. Please visit this forum thread for information on how to go about this.
Next Level Competitive Gaming
For the competitive gamers amongst you we can announce increased guaranteed funds for the following tournaments. These are the minimums with potential to grow significantly depending on interest and with additional sponsorship:
- Counter-strike Source (PC) – minimum £7.5k
- Call of Duty 4 (PC) – minimum £2.5k
- Team Fortress 2 (PC) – minimum £5k
- Starcraft 2 (PC) – minmum £2.5k
- League of Legends (PC) – minimum £2.5k
- Halo Reach (XBOX360) – minimum £2.5k
- FIFA 11 (XBOX360) – minimum £1k
- Fighting Games (XBOX360) (Tekken 6, MK9, MvC3, SSF4:AE) – minimum £1k across the tournaments.
For XBOX360 we will shortly be announcing the relaunch of our TUP (Turn UP and Play) ticket which allows people to make use of provided equipment in entering these tournaments rather than having to BYOX, although BYOX is still of course an option. We’re really throwing our support behind the XBOX scene once again!
More coming soon!
Over the coming days and weeks we will be posting more information about the venue, tournaments, amenities, hotel preferential rates, catering, clanboxes and all the other great stuff we have planned to make insomnia43 the best event ever!
We believe this move marks a turning point, both in the history of the i-Series and the development of the UK scene as a whole. The past two years have seen the wagons circled and riding out the economic downturn, with the vanishing marketing spend by companies which supported the events at Stoneleigh. It’s now time to break out and take the insomnia events to a level not seen before.
We really hope you’ll want to be a part of it as we enter the next chapter of gaming in the UK!
Categorised in: insomnia43
8 responses to “Insomnia Gaming Festival moves to the Telford International Centre!”
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awesome!
HUZZAH! More Space! More Central! This is really quite awesome!
not knit picking but its Mortal Kombat 9(so MK9) not Mortal Combat 9(MC9).
also when will you start supporting ps3? not everyone has/wants a xbox360(I await the ‘attak’ on the current psn situation from the xbox360 fans).
Awesome!
http://andrikyrychok.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/happy.gif
I cannot wait for this.. good choice guys! <3
Great, now just make a Heroes of Newerth tourney and all will be complete!
I am sad that I’ll never be able to come to an iSeries event again 🙁
The place looks amazing, so I’m sure it will be for the good of Multiplay. Unfortunatley for me, my time, and my budget, I just wont be able to come again.
Anyone from Telford play LoL, holla at me!