Livestreaming game site Twitch is about to hold its first ever fan event later this month, and the company is starting to share some of the big panels and booths you can look forward to.
We’ve gone through the list and picked out some of the participants that look the most interesting to us for the September 25 and September 26 TwitchCon event. These are the companies and speakers that could make news or they could just make for a good time. But either way, we’ll tune in to watch them or check them out in person.
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Founder Faceoff
How Twitch describes it:
In this battle of the brass, Twitch chief executive officer and founder Emmett Shear will take on Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. You can’t have a match this size without commentators and coaches, so be prepared for special guests.
Why we’re excited:
Shear and Morhaime are a pair of interesting and powerful people in the world of gaming, and this sounds like a casual setup. Hopefully, that’ll get each men talking and joking around in a way that you don’t usually see from executives.
Blizzard Entertainment
How Twitch describes it: As part of Twitch CEO/founder Emmett Shear’s keynote presentation, Blizzard Entertainment will be revealing brand new content live for StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void.
Why we’re excited: We’ve waited patiently for Legacy of the Void details, and it sounds like we should get a lot from this presentation.
Video Game Championship Wrestling
How Twitch describes it: VGCW is known for customized character wrestling matches, so expect some familiar looking competitors.
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Why we’re excited: Real-world wrestling is dumb in a pretty good way, but VGCW is even better as it includes characters like Solid Snake and Solid Snake’s creator Hideo Kojima all vying for the same championship belts. How this will translate into a live panel is a mystery, and one we will watch to get answers to.
Super Smash Bros. Exhibition
How Twitch describes it: Twitch and Red Bull love Smash and want to throw a competition together, but have one dilemma. They can’t agree where to have the event. To settle the score, SF-based Twitch are battling LA-based Red Bull in a Super Smash Bros. Exhibition Match, where the winning office chooses the location of a $10,000 prize-pool Super Smash Bros. event (NorCal vs SoCal).
Why we’re excited: Super Smash Bros. is always a fun game to watch, and friendly competition always makes things better.
HTC Vive
How Twitch describes it: Allowing users to traverse and explore a virtual world, the HTC Vive with SteamVR is a first of a kind virtual reality system that enables “360° room-scale VR.” It also features wireless controllers designed specifically for VR interaction. HTC will be showing demos including titles from WEVR, Radial Games & Northway Games, Skillman and Hackett, and Valve.
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Why we’re excited: We’ve used HTC Vive. It’s incredible. We can’t wait to see more about it, but we also are interested to see how this works on Twitch. These games are inherently difficult to explain with words, but maybe livestreaming could help. And it seems likely that Valve, HTC, and Twitch will have a workable solution to make that happen.