It all started late April 2011. Both rizc and I (Phoinx) were present at Copenhagen Games as press. When the Danish Championship started on stage, everyone not there were asking for SourceTV or stream, so since we had some cameras with us, we decided to set up a camera showing the stage with all ten players' monitors. We hadn't done any streaming before, so it was kinda bad, but it started us thinking about the whole live-streaming business.

When we were back home, we started looking in to this, only to realize, that there were actually no other live-streaming services for Counter-Strike: Source - except ESL TV. This gave us the motivation we needed to get this project up and running ASAP. Less than a month later we got our first gig! We were going to cover The Blast 2011 - a danish LAN with most of the danish top-teams attending.

Everything ran as great as possible at the event, so we were sure this journey wouldn't stop here. Our name was at this point known to most of the danish CS:S-scene. But we wanted more! We partnered up with ESL and covered the ESL Major Series VIII (EMS #8). This was our first international breakthrough, but still not enough to become THE CS:S stream!

hunden (left) and 3k2 (middle) interviews TheBlast 2011-winner orga (right)

A lot of time passed by without anything really happening. The only highlight in the following couple of months were ONIC #1 in late September, where the best teams in Danish CS:S (except CKRAS) were attending. This event was a disaster from our point of view, because the internet-café couldn't provide us with a sufficiently stable internet-connection. Everything else was great though, and we really had a great time there.

Now things started to go fast for us. In October, we had to cover NetPartyFyn (14th to 16th October), Gaming4Life (16th to 20th October) and the ESWC Grand Finals 2011 (24th to 25th October) - three events in 10 days. At this time we could also present a new sponsor, SteelSeries, who have been providing us with products since.

We used NetPartyFyn as a kind of warmup for the other events to get everything ready. It wasn't a very competitive event, so we took the opportunity to take it relax a bit. At Gaming4Life there were a lot of issues with our space, the internet and the servers. This made us very frustrated, since we just wanted to get started. But at last, when everything was running, everything just seemed to work out for us. We reached a new record of viewers on the stream at the same time (600 viewers!) and we got great feedback from a lot of people.

GameCast and the organizer, Kennet (DCS) (Photo: www.gaming4life.dk)

Now it was time for the event of the year - the super-hyped ESWC Grand Finals 2011. Most of the greatest teams of the world were there, and we were the only official Counter-Strike: Source stream covering the event - a lot of streams also covered it though. We had just made a completely new and innovative CS:S streaming GUI. Giving the viewers the best experience. This was also seen on the number of viewers we had - I remember we passed 1120 viewers at some point. In other games such as StarCraft II or League of Legends, this might not seem like many, but in Counter-Strike: Source only ESL has managed to get that viewer-count in a long time (maybe since The-eXperience 09?).

That was our last major event of the year, and with the new viewer-record we realized, that we couldn't get much further in Counter-Strike: Source. Now we began our expansion into whole new worlds. This is where our 2011-adventure ends. We are currently enjoying our holiday here in Denmark, waiting for 2012 to start.

Phoinx and rizc loving the life of a livestreamer

We are really looking forward to 2012. Our first events have already been planned - we are going to cover both ONIC #2 and HKLAN #5 in the first two months. Our goals for 2012 is to expand our brand, so that we are able to provide (LAN) events with a complete coverage "package" where we cover all the games being played there. Will this succeed? Only time will tell, but we are certain, that 2012 has a lot to bring and GameCast will definitely set their mark on this year in eSports!