For the first time ever, classic college rivals battled for bragging rights and the latest cutting-edge NVIDIA GeForce GTX hardware donations for their schools in NVIDIA’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II Rivalries tour, produced by Ignited.
A total of eight colleges from around the country participated in the tour, with three finalists and two wildcard schools earning all-expense paid trips to NVIDIA’s corporate headquarters to battle it out on Activision’s newest Call of Duty title, Black Ops II.
Outside of the entertainment aspect of engaging students in a friendly tournament, there was also an educational aspect to the program in helping to showcase the relevancy of computer science and graphics development with respect to video game creation. NVIDIA has a strong recruitment program for students in these fields post-graduation.
This past Saturday, January 19, NVIDIA hosted the Wildcard Playoffs & Championship event for their NVIDIA Call of Duty: Black Ops II Rivalries tour at their Santa Clara, CA headquarters.
The three finalists were UC Berkeley, University of Southern California and NC State. Both East Carolina University and Oregon State rallied fans during a four week online voting contest on NVIDIA GeForce’s Facebook page to secure their two Wildcard slots.
In addition to producing the tour, this past Saturday Ignited produced a live, multi-camera shoot and streamed it live on Twitch.tv to over 200,000 unique viewers.
The last two teams standing – East Carolina University and University of Southern California – competed for the ultimate prize – a custom GeForce GTX 680 gaming rig for each player. In the end, ECU earned bragging rights as the first-ever NVIDIA Call of Duty: Black Ops II Rivalries Champion.
