Red Bull planning unique interactive StarCraft 2 tournament at PAX

We don't often post about eSports tournaments and events, but this one was just too much fun to pass up. Red Bull has announced they'll be holding the Red Bull LAN Seattle nightly after PAX, and it's far from your typical eSports tournament.

The LAN will feature eight pro StarCraft 2 players going head-to-head on never-before-seen custom maps. But the cool part is that the tournament is actually interactive. Fans both in the audience and streaming from home will be able to vote on different obstacles, parameters and events for the match as they go on.

Yesterday they showed one ability the fans can vote for which essentially rejumbles the map mid-match, and tosses each player's resources into the middle of the map randomly. The ability they're showing off today includes a unit ability that was actually cut from the game before the final release. It's called the Planet Cracker, and it essentially unleashes a doom ray that roves the battlefield, vaporizing anything that gets caught underneath it. You can check that out in the embedded video below.

StarCraft 2 is an awesome spectator game, and we're looking forward to checking out this bizarre tournament-esque-type-thing at PAX next week. The Red Bull LAN Seattle will be running concurrently with PAX every night 7pm to 11pm from Aug 30 to Sept 1, and voting can be found on their website. In the meantime, the Major League Gaming Summer Arena is coming up this weekend which promises to hold a ton of great SC2 action, along with a ton of other great games like Mortal Kombat and League of Legends.

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Andrew Groen

Andrew is a freelance video game journalist, writing for sites like Wired and GamesRadar. Andrew has also written a book called EMPIRES OF EVE: A History of the Great Wars of EVE Online.

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