The final awards ceremony of the CPL started with one of the biggest announcements, the location of the World Tour stops. Angel Munoz, CPL President, said the game of the World Tour would be released once the game was released, which, according to him, would be in the next few days to a week. That eliminates a lot of possibilities, leading many to believe that game will be Doom 3 – something that we’ve been speculating for a while. We will need to wait a few more days for the official announcement.

As for the locations, ten separate countries were announced. China, Spain, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Sweden, USA, Taiwan, Japan, UK and Chile will be the ten locations, in that order. Many of the venues haven’t been announced or decided with different possibilities still being weighed.

One of the most important announcements is that many of the sites on the World Tour will be hosting other tournaments along with the World Tour official game. Individual conversations with a few hosts confirmed CS tournaments to be run in Spain, Brazil and Chile while every organizer GotFrag spoke with expressed interest in running a multiple formats. This is a bit of a change as many thought that the World Tour game might be the only tournament at those stops. We’ve gotten official word from CPL Operations Director Scott Valencia that all stops on the tour will have BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) areas, saying that each stop will have a minimum of 1,000 attendees.

The Stops, The Money

More good news as Angel announced an addition $500k will be added to the World Tour strictly for Counter-Strike prizes. Many stops have scheduled to have other games involved. Here’s a breakdown of all the current information known for the tour stops:

CPL China: February 2005
City – Shanghai
Games – World Tour Game, TBA

CPL Spain: March 2005
City - Barcelona
Games – World Tour Game, CS, TBA

CPL Yugoslavia: April 2005
City – TBA
Games – World Tour Game, TBA

CPL Brazil: May 2005
City - San Paulo
Games – World Tour Game, CS, WC3
Notes: They are looking to bring in 3K people with a BYOC and local pre-Qualifiers,

CPL Sweden: June 2005
City – TBA
Games - World Tour Game, TBA

CPL USA: July 2005
City – Dallas
Games - World Tour Game, TBA

CPL Taiwan: August 2005
City – TBA
Games - World Tour Game, TBA

CPL Japan: September 2005
City - Tokyo
Games - World Tour Game, TBA
Notes: This will be the first major gaming LAN event in the country of Japan and expects to have BYOC.

CPL UK: October 2005
City – TBA
Games - World Tour Game, TBA
Notes: They expect to have BYOC and pre-Qualifiers with the goal of being one of the most memorable events in the UK ever.

CPL Chile: November 2005
City – Santiago
Games - World Tour Game, CS, TBA
Notes: With BYOC of 500-1K people and pre-Qualifiers in other countries, LAN-Z will be hosting one of the largest LAN events in Chile history.

CPL Championship: December 2005
City – TBA (United States)
Games - World Tour Game, CS, TBA (Four Games total)
Notes: Takes place at the same venue as an award show; and will be broadcast on TV during the show.

Media Coverage

While still hesitant to give names on the record, speaking to Angel Munoz and Scott Valencia gave us a great idea of what to expect. The CPL is going to be covered by more mainstream media for the tour. The biggest part of the coverage has to be the news of a weekly show on US cable television, on a network that “caters heavily to generation Y and high tech audiences”. Again, we have our ideas, but nothing’s confirmed yet.

We’ve gotten word of several big names that will be attending for print and mainstream online news and online gaming. We’ll wait for the CPL to make their announcements, but we can be sure that the gaming community be impressed with the roster of media that is scheduled to attend the stops of the tour.

Naturally, Gotfrag will be in attendance.

The Final Event

The world tour is ten stops that travels the globe, almost in a qualifier style system that will build up to a final event held in the United States. The final event is scheduled for December of 2005, to end the year with what aims to be the biggest event in the history of eSports. By the numbers, the World Tour 1v1 game will have a $500,000 USD prize for the final event alone. Additionally, there will be three other games played, including Counter-Strike.

The event will be hosted in the same building as an awards show to be broadcast on the cable TV station that will be following the tour. One question this raises is if we are still talking about Dallas. For the lifetime of the CPL, every domestic event with the exception of one has been hosted in the Dallas, Texas area. Another big step is that the CPL has told Gotfrag that they are targeting 5 worldwide sponsors for the tour (they currently have three in NVidia, Hitachi and CompUSA).

We'll have more information as it becomes available, and we also plan to have our own announcements related to the game used for the CPL World Tour. Stay tuned, this will be an exciting week!