Apparently my local game cafe, The Combat Zone (TCZ) is truly no more. For anybody who's reading this, I'll elaborate-
TCZ opened in my town last July. It was a godsend. For 5 dollars an hour, or 20 dollars all-day, you could play whatever games you liked. It was Utopia. Rainbow Six 3, Operation Flashpoint, CNC Generals, Battlefield 1942, you name it, they had it- or would buy it. Three of my friends became full-time employees there and I played tons of games there. It used to be that me and my friends would hang out at each other's houses whenever we could. When TCZ opened, we just went there.
Apparently that place would have never existed if the Slavs who made Operation Flashpoint- www.thecombatzone.com was originally created to hold OF tournaments. Eventually it became a host site for a plethora of games. Finally, the founder of the website, whose online name is Holden, decided to make a gaming cafe by the same name.
He came to my hometown and set up TCZ with the help of a guy named Dan, who he knew for 15 years from a previous business endeavor. It was like Jesus descending from heaven, that's how awesome this place was.
Five months later. It's December, and TCZ was about to hold an event called "Sleep is for the Weak"- a seven day long gaming spree. 100 bucks for all week. Never happened. This is where I get sour.
Apparently Dan bought out a store in the mall called Digital Mayhem , a similar gaming cafe. This went against a business agreement and hence was illegal. So Holden sued Dan because it cost a fortune and was a violation in their agreement.
TCZ was forced to shut down soon thereafter as a court mandate. But it didn't stop there.
A month later, we found out that Dan broke into the cafe by breaking the lock. He loaded all the PC towers into the back of a truck, packed the futon there, left the monitors on the desks. Changed the lock on the way out, too.
This, of course, was a violation of the court agreement, which said that nobody was allowed in TCZ until the dispute settled. Dan later tried to escape court by trying to coax Holden into buying the PCs from him. Each PC had an Nvidia 5700, but ran Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 like a dream. Trust me, I've seen them in action.
Holden went to court over it. The court agreement said Holden could get half of the PCs back from Dan. Now he's selling the PCs because he can't salvage TCZ. Which means TCZ is closed forever. I plan on buying one of those PCs and upgrading it, so that maybe I can recreate a little bit of TCZ in my basement, which is where my consoles are. Hopefully I can help Holden resalvage some of his losses by buying one.
Dan still has Digital Mayhem, and he's living all nice and comfy. Shut down my goddam cafe and reaps the benefits. If Dan wasn't such a bastard, TCZ would still be here. I'm going to find a way to shut him down. Or at least, salvage the reamins of Holden's dream....
TCZ is dead. Long live TCZ.