Forged in Fire – Chapter Nine: The Build Begins – A Race Against Time

“Someone else was taking care of the grand strategy; we just got the part where £19,000 made everything possible.”

The Build Begins – A Race Against Time

With the funding confirmed, the first steps were immediate: completing that shopping list. I had all the desks and chairs already poised in my Amazon cart, ready to go. The British Esports Association had also secured us a fantastic deal on 12 PCs, which we executed the purchase of immediately. I even headed to Game with my loyalty card in hand and picked up 8 PS4s along with a selection of games to get us started.

The challenges, of course, weren’t entirely over. There were significant problems with the WiFi in the Henderson Room itself, so I had to quickly organise a couple of 3G routers to provide mobile WiFi access for all the necessary updates and online play. Then came the deluge of miscellaneous but crucial items: power bank adaptors, picture frames, nails, screws, bean bags, monitors, and TVs. It was a frantic evening getting all those orders placed. Everything was getting delivered to my married quarter at the time, and I spent a considerable amount of effort meeting delivery drivers with work vans, getting everything transported onto the Station, and finally dropped off directly into the room.

The committee truly pulled together and drilled, assembled, and installed everything – chairs, computers, tables, and consoles. We printed pictures and posters, carefully hanging them in frames to transform the space. I was calling in people from work to help, and my wife and I even came in on weekends to push the build forward. There was so much to do, but by ticking off the little steps like side quests, we hit the bigger objectives and made steady progress. The physical building phase was completed with three days to spare.

Downloading updates for Windows and games, particularly over the mobile WiFi, was a pain, but we persevered. We even had a super PC esports athlete among our early members who suggested a brilliant “Plan B” for the opening day: download Team Fortress 2 onto a portable hard drive, flash it onto the PCs, and host a LAN party if we couldn’t get all the PCs updated and installed in time. For the PlayStations, we planned 3v3 Rocket League local play, with the last two PS4s loaded with FIFA. I personally took the PlayStations home to update and install all the games and PSN updates over my own WiFi.

In those three weeks leading up to the grand opening, we also settled on a name for our esports club. Conveniently, the club room, or esports arena as we should now refer to it, was located directly above the Chinook-friendly named ‘Blades Bar’. With its Costa, food, and beer, it just made sense that the name of the club had to be the RAF Odiham Blades, or simply Odiham Blades for brevity. I had a fantastic graphics designer, Jason Armstrong, who created a truly class Station esports crest for our team – another top gamer himself. We quickly ratified our name and crest.

Josh Hollings, my FIFA partner-in-crime from Iraq, knocked up a fantastic Discord server for the club in next to no time, giving me all the permissions in the world and leaving me to it. As a console gamer, I had no idea what I was doing with Discord at the time, but it was something I learned really quickly. With hindsight, I learned not to over complicate your server, otherwise you lose too much information. Regardless, everything was getting ticked off. We even built a Facebook page and a Twitter page (which we were told to take down by the head of the RAF Esports Association – didn’t even get to make a single post!).

A lot of what we were doing in the build-up had never been done before; we were truly pioneering, ready to share our stories with other Stations and help them with their own setups when the time eventually came.

Next time on Forged in Fire…

Everything was set, from bean bags to battle stations—now we just had to hope no one caused a digital apocalypse in the first hour.

In Chapter 10: A Day of Triumph. Everything was in place, the arena ready, and all that remained was to see the culmination of months of planning come to life on opening day.