Next: Day 1

EVE Online is a weird game. It has been described variously as Spreadsheets in Space, Internet Spaceships and That One Game where Someone Stole like, a Thousand Dollars or Something. In reality it’s all of this and more, but what really makes the game special is all the players who populate the world both physical and virtual. EVE player meetups are common around the globe, but nothing brings a few thousand nerds together like the yearly event that is Fanfest. Hosted in Iceland by the native developers CCP Games, Fanfest has grown over the past twelve years into a three-day span of keynotes, presentations, roundtables, dinners, icelandic events, and lots and lots of drinking.

My story starts at 6:30 on Tuesday morning. Having decided to go to Fanfest for the first time, I’m now awake earlier than is humanly healthy. I scramble some breakfast together before the taxi arrives--I’m taking trains from Cambridge to Gatwick for the next few hours, which goes surprisingly smoothly despite intersecting with peak commuter traffic. Gatwick itself is pretty quiet - it’s now well into Tuesday so not many tourists are around.

Being a complete newbie to air travel, I completely fail the security checks. After having to explain to a somewhat-interested security guard what each of the many electronic devices in my rucksack actually do, I end up in Departures, lighter only by a small can of deodorant I had mislaid.

At this point I met one of the first people I’d been meaning to see - Eli Grange. I’ve flown spaceships with Eli on quite a few occasions, although I mostly know him from out-of-game chatting. I’ve been playing EVE on and off for five years or so, and in that time Eli has hosted a couple of UK meets which have been a lot of fun.

We grab a couple of last-minute supplies and make our way onto the plane, which the Icelandic pilot cheerfully informs us is named after Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano famous for interrupting all european air travel for several days back in 2010. It should be noted at this point that the Icelandic are nothing if not a little crazy.

The flight is a fairly standard three-hour trip up through Scotland and into Keflavik. The sun is shining and the plane is pleasantly warm, but as we start flying over solid land again in Iceland it's clear that snow is never far away here, at least at this time of year.

Picking up baggage at the arrivals lounge, we met another couple of friends from our general social group and head outside. As we wandered towards the airport exit, we were suprised by a huge crowd of people holding a large Fanfest banner and cheering the new arrivals. It turned out that CCP had organised a party bus to take us from the Keflavik airport to Reykjavik where all the action was going to happen. Before we knew it, we were sitting on a coach with a bunch of other EVE players, holding a beer and cheering a couple of devs who had come along for the ride.

The bus dropped us off at Harpa and we had a few minutes' walk up to our hotel. Everything is pretty tightly packed here - there are dozens of bars, resturants, coffee shops, hotels and Harpa all within a short walk of each other.

Since it was also St. Patrick's Day, we of course had to start the drinking early. We ended up The Dubliner -- a very irish bar with very irish drinks and (after a few hours) a very irish live band that played loud classic songs to everyone's amusement.

To cap the night off, the Northern Lights came out to play. We only got a glimpse of them from the city, but some of the tours managed to escape the ambient light and see the lights in all their glory. Sadly, at this point I had had a long day and needed to fall into bed.