Gecosports: SA gaming venue and e-Sports initiative

Looking for a venue for your next LAN party? Want to get your national colours and represent South Africa as a Call of Duty player? Need somewhere safe to bunker down if robots attack? Gecosports in Claremont, Cape Town has you covered for all of these things. We wiretapped the phones, and listened to owners Marlon Sasman and Gareth De Bruyn talking about their plans.

We also infiltrated the place with spy-drones disguised as flies and took some surveillance photos.

What’s Gecosports all about?

Gecosports is a gaming facility in Cape Town with a heavy focus on the development of South African e-Sports, while still catering for casual gamers as well as the hosting of awesome events.

Pro-Tournaments will be hosted every month in an effort to showcase the talent of the most skilled individuals in the Cape Town area, focusing on different games each month. Taking August as an example, we are currently hosting FIFA 12 and Modern Warfare 3 Pro-Tournaments. Next month will be a different focus where we can tell you thus far that one of them will be Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition which will take place across the 3^rd and 4^th weekend of September.

All information on our Pro-Tournaments will be updated monthly via our website, and communicated through our website’s blog function called the Gecosports Chronicle, accessible from the home page.

Aside from these Pro-Tournaments, the facility is open Monday to Sunday for all types of gamers to come and enjoy a session at Gecosports playing their favourite games, whether selecting from the many titles we have on offer or bringing their own games and consoles, should they want to play online or with friends using their own save games and profiles. We also cater for group sessions where we reserve a section of the facility for groups such as Cape Town Showdown’s Fight Club, who have officially chosen Gecosports as their training facility for the foreseeable future.

What gear do you have?

We have 4x Xbox 360 Slim 250GBs and 6x PS3 Slim 320GBs, our internet is powered by MWEB’s 4Mb Business Uncapped Unshaped ADSL, and we have 16x JVC 26-inch HD LCD TVs with the extra 8 TVs catering for LAN events, clan matches and mobile use.

We will also be having Gunnar Optiks Eyewear and Tritton headsets on hand courtesy of Comet Computing, and will be bringing in international brands such as Squidgrip where all of these will be available for sale from Gecosports as well, so essentially, we are doubling up as an interactive demo area for potential buyers. We will also be including gaming PCs in the very near future, to cater for the PC gaming market as well.

How do memberships work, and how do players go about getting their national colours?

We have different membership options, but only one of these can potentially earn a gamer their national colours – that’s the GECOPRO Elite Membership earned only by winning a Pro-Tournament.

Nonetheless, all memberships afford the gamer discounts and additional benefits, but most importantly a membership provides them with the most cost-effective solution to enjoy our facilities, instead of paying daily. Memberships are not contractual but instead are on a month-to-month basis. Should the gamer need to break away for exams, travel or work requirements, we will freeze the membership as of the following month up until such a time that they are ready to resume.

The first step in attaining colours is through our MSSA-sanctioned Pro-Tournaments, where winners of these tournaments are inducted into our GECOPRO Division. Players in the GECOPRO Division become MSSA-registered players, which then allows them to compete at Regional, Provincial and National championships giving them the opportunity to earn their colours.

What are the basic costs for gamers, including casual day passes and membership?

Visitor Passes, as we call them, coss R30, where this is the daily rate to enter into the club. This then allows them to do whatever they wish and play whatever they want, not limited by time, game title or platform. We do however have a Fair Usage Policy in place in respect of healthy gaming; if a gamer is playing for 3 hours straight we will politely instruct them to rest their eyes and stretch their legs by taking a break. If it means they leave and come back after some time, they do not pay to come back in on that same day.

We then have our Casual membership which costs R180 per month with the included benefit of 50% discount on all Gecosports-hosted events. For example our Pro-Tournaments costs R80 to enter, so a member will only pay R40.

Our next Tier is the Hardcore Membership which costs R240 per month, and affords the member the same benefits as the Casual tier with the addition of one free Pro-Tournament entry per month. We are working on a third membership structure that will be geared towards semi-pro gamers, and we will reveal more on that as we develop it further.

What games are you officially supporting now and in the near future?

In terms of competitive titles, we have the following on both 360 and PS3 platforms, with 4 copies per platform: COD: Modern Warfare 3, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and FIFA 12.

In September we will be bringing in Gears of War 3 and Forza 4, and within the next coming months Tekken Tag Tournament 2, FIFA 13, COD: Black Ops 2, Forza Horizon, and Starcraft II.

Aside from competitive titles we have a stack of other games for enjoyment such as the Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Singstar series (with peripherals), single player games like Red Dead Redemption and the Assassin’s Creed series, and will be bringing in the likes of Halo 4, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, NFS: Most Wanted and F1 2012 to name a few. Our current offering is 20 individual titles and counting.

What are your own backgrounds in the gaming community?

Gareth and I have been running Cape Town gaming events since late 2008 where the main platform was the PS3za forum (now known as the SA Gamer forum), hosting one event every 3 months which grew by the numbers from a mere 15 people to 100 by the end of 2010. On a personal level; Gareth is well-known within the COD community as founding father of the clan eVolution who are still going strong today, and is currently a member of the MW3 clan RSS.

On my side, I am a Cape Town Guitar Hero champ with 3 consecutive wins between 2007 and 2008, had a 3-month radio stint with JP Naude in 2010 as the Good Hope FM Gaming Guru, and am currently on the el33tonline team as a writer and their Cape Town correspondent.

Anything else important to add?

Stay tuned for our fun-filled Theme Evenings such as the upcoming COD: Black Ops Zombies, Ladies Night is SingStar Night, and the Guitar Hero Rock Party to name a few. Details on when these will take place will be communicated via social media.

Within the coming months we will also be on road-shows, taking gaming to far-out and underprivileged areas in search of young individuals who have a natural hand-eye coordination talent. As we have only just completed month one, there are many more things in the works at Gecosports as we have a 3 year roll-out plan, and within this 3-year plan we hope to open more Gecosports branches in neighbouring cities. To keep up-to-date of what’s on and happening at Gecosports, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our Facebook page.