This charitable gaming competition wants to bring LAN parties back to life

RGB LAN is a three-day long PC gaming and charity event dedicated to the joy of good gaming and the power of gaming for good. From March 3-5, participants will get together at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pa. to play games, compete in tournaments and bask in the warm glow of countless computers and community.

In addition to gathering prizes from sponsors, we’re also collecting donations to ultimately be given to three local Philadelphia nonprofits: TechGirlz, The Hacktory, and Coded by Kids. Attendees are broken into three teams — red, green, and blue — and each one is paired up with one of these awesome local nonprofits.

If you’re a participant, every tournament your team wins, every raffle ticket you buy and every time you tweet to one of RGB LAN’s sponsors, you’ll earn points for your team. And those points unlock the donations pledged for your charity!

By creating these new teams and points system, we transform the event into one giant game that everyone is playing together, all weekend long. It morphs the solitary experience of gaming into a collective atmosphere of friendly competition, while also keeping everyone working toward a common goal.

Over the last ten years, I’ve attended and organized dozens of these types of events. Unfortunately, with the rise of internet-only multiplayer games, LAN parties like this are dying because they fail to keep people engaged with each other during the event. I’m hoping the team-rivalry and charity theme behind RGB LAN is the solution to this problem. I want the see these types of events stay around as long as possible.

Plus, sponsors weren’t getting good return on their investment. I’ve really loved working with D-Link, Enermax, and In Win over the years, but I’ve been limited to only finding sponsors that can give us physical products for the giveaways and prizes. Now that we’re also requesting donations for our charities, this gives sponsors like Massdrop and Crunchyroll the chance to reach their target demographic, even if they’re not a typical PC-hardware manufacturer.

Ideally I want RGB LAN to accomplish three things: I want the attendees to win a bunch of prizes and have as much fun as humanly possible, I want the sponsors to get their product or brand in the hands and mind of the gamers, and I want to raise a ton of money for three amazing local organizations. If we can succeed in those three things, I would consider it a huge success and I’ll keep running these events as much as I can.

So join me! Declare your allegiance, don your colors, and come frag a n00b for the good of mankind.

Register