Gallery: Atomic celebrated its first decade in style. Here's our report, our thanks, and a giant gallery of pics of the night!
So, Atomic is now officially – and perhaps a little drunkenly – TEN YEARS OLD. And boy did we celebrate in style!
Last week we gathered a hundred of our best and brightest, from all the aspects that make Atomic what it is (and how awesome it is!) for a night of especial magnificence. We had an even split – about fifty Atomicans, including some serious forum stalwarts who are as responsible for forging the Atomic identity as anyone alive, and about fifty of our industry partners from companies as diverse as AnyWare, Dell, Altech, Kingston and GIGABYTE.
Not to mention a fine selection of Atomic staff past and present, including all bar one of the original crew that started it all! Truly, Atomic has stood on the shoulders of giants.
And what did we do? We had a trivia night.
Not just any trivia night, mind, but an awesomely geeky, gamey and downright bloody challenging trivia night. Classic tunes turned into 8-bit music; obscure lines from video games; hardware conundrums – it was all there, not to mention the usual array of participation rounds just to get people standing up and touching their bottoms.
Some (*cough* Morris! *cough*) were better at this than others...
There was food, there was drinking, there was general hilarity. There were tables of top tech from our sponsors on the night (and a huge thanks to them, too – great work Kingston, Antec and GIGABYTE, we couldn’t have done it without you!), some of the best gamers in the country from Team Immunity, and a general feeling of awesome warm fuzziness - not to mention special Atomic Cupcakes! This was celebrating a hell of an achievement after all.
As I said on the night, if you were in the room that night, then you could enjoy knowing that in whatever way, you had directly helped Atomic make this milestone, but really the people who make Atomic are much wider spread than that. I, as editor, and someone who was there when Ben Mansill started the mag, take great pride in the fact that not only do we still have readers from that period, or that we still have people on the forums who where there when it switched on, but that all these people so happily identify by that affiliation. Atomicans... I cannot think of another property, print or digital, that garners such loyalty.
Aside from the readers, we also owe a lot to all the companies that have supported us over the years. Whether it be through advertising, or sponsoring events, or the generous supply of hardware for us to break, bake, bash and generally hack, they’ve one and all helped build Atomic into – in my humble opinion – one of the best tech mags not only in Australia, but in the world.
So, thanks everyone, thanks for ten great years.
PS – Antec, who so generously sponsored our birthday bash could not be there on the night, but the folks there were nice enough to record a little birthday video for us. It’s kinda sweet, so check it out!
Issue: 137 | June, 2012