Back when Tempo was an esports and gaming content creation company more than the game design and game development company that it is now, we had a content director named Glen Tokola who took over the editorial department after me. After Tempo phased out those departments, the Glen transitioned his career to a different position, and is now the Esports Manager at the University of Washington.
With my stay in the Seattle Metropolitan Area soon coming to an end, Glen wanted to give me a tour of the university campus before I left and continued on my road trip, so I headed over to check out the football stadium and some of the university buildings.
The tour started at Husky Stadium. One of Glen’s co-workers who handles sales for the football team showed us around and was able to take us to some of the more exclusive areas.
We eventually made it to the upper-most floor, where I stepped outside and was able to see unobstructed views of the entire field.
This area of the stands also had amazing views of Union Bay and Lake Washington.
We also got to take a peek into the presidential suite. Apparently this is a coveted place from which only the highly privileged are able to watch the football games. To me, it just looked like a normal room, but I took our tour guide’s word about the prestige of the room, so I snapped a photo.
After a thorough trip around the stadium, we headed to the main campus area. At the end of a long, grassy strip of field was Drumheller Fountain.
From this point, we walked around some more and I wasn’t quite able to keep up with exactly what buildings we were entering, but we saw some interesting libraries and even peeked our heads into some empty classrooms, waiting to be occupied by students in the upcoming and soon-to-start academic year.
Finally, Glen took us to the new esports room, which is basically like a LAN center.
I already played a lot of video games when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, though I was somewhat limited by the fact that my laptop wasn’t very high-end, so I lagged a lot. I’m glad that my school didn’t have something like this when I was a student about a decade ago, or else I feel like I would’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in it.
Here is Glen in his office.
The University of Washington campus had a lot of husky statues scattered around. I pet all the ones I came across, but decided to take a picture with one before I left.
For the record, I thought Glen would zoom in and capture just my face with the face of the husky, which is why I am standing in a way that makes it look like I learned how to use my legs yesterday … I did not realize that he was going for a full-body shot.
Overall, our tour was a little over three miles (the GPS tracker shows less distance because I started it late and it also didn’t keep track of movement very accurately inside some of the buildings). It got a little warm towards the end, but it was a pleasant trip, and it brought back some of the nice memories from when I was still an undergraduate student.
