You made this post before I had time to get off from the plane bringing me back. Between the holidays and some ongoing family issues, I haven't had time to go through my pictures of the event, but that's done now. Therefore, pictures! Click on them to make them bigger! Those taken during the panels often had me focusing on the large screens overhead, as I had a better view of them than the stage itself.

As you probably know by now, Minecon 2012 took place in Disneyland Paris. The main area for the event was split in two locations: the Convention Centre, attached to the New York hotel, and in a semi-permanent tent with enough seating room for 5000+ people.



The event went very well overall. The 2011 edition was dubbed "Linecon" by some people because of the constant waiting lines to get anywhere, but that wasn't a problem this time around. I'm guessing they learned from the experience! The only real place with a lot of waiting time was for the Jinx store. They sold a lot of Minecraft merchandise, including the convention-exclusive t-shirt, and people sure wanted to buy their foam swords and cardboard heads. At some point, I estimate that the line was over 2 hours long! I tried to capture a global shot of that, but it was so spread out it was impossible.



Some of you followed the webcast of the panels as they were streamed live, so I won't talk about those. You can find the recordings with a bit of smart searching anyway. The most interesting one, in my opinion, was held by Jeb and the dev team and focused on the 1.5 update, nicknamed the Redstone Update.



Quite a few people showed up in costume, some with very elaborate presentations. That convinced the Minecon team to do an unscheduled costume competition, where all the interested people could come on stage, show their work, and then hopefully win a prize after being voted on by a few Mojang representatives. The grand prize? A special edition Xbox 360 signed by all the staff members of Mojang!



The Mojang staff itself was walking around the event when not busy otherwise, and were usually available for autographs. It was quite funny to see people gang-rushing a recognizable member of the team as soon as one walked by! Poor Notch must have had a numb hand by the end of Minecon. I'm not much of an autograph chaser myself, so I didn't get any.



All attendess were presented by a goodies bag full of gifts, rebates and ads. I chose to hand over most of the neat stuff in the giveaway. The Xbox t-shirts had to be collected separately, from Microsoft's large dedicated area, and those were quite popular! Microsoft was on location to showcase the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft, and had over 40 consoles setup with monitors for people to play with. I sat down to one myself (when I found a rare opened spot!) and gave it a spin. I felt like such a newbie trying to find my way around the interface and the controls, despite knowing full well how the game itself plays!



So that was it. Fun times were had, and it was obviously over far too soon.

Edited by Dr. Cossack on January 6, 2013 at 12:40:39