Once upon a time, 1993 to be precise, two valiant young gaming fans journeyed to the role-playing and wargaming Warpcon convention in faraway Cork. Three days  later, Alan Neill and Matt Johnson returned to Belfast with a quest: to start their own games convention, the first of its kind in Northern Ireland. Thus Q-Con was born, and its incredible growth in the 30 years since is an epic tale of dedication  and determination – one that also involves kittens, watermelons and a very big drill.

From those first 150 intrepid gamers who assembled in the Queen’s Students’ Union to play everything from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) to Risk, comes the 10,000 people who visited the 29th Q-Con last year. They came to cosplay and to play board games, role-playing games, tabletop games, war games and video games. They came to watch anime, buy fan merchandise, try their luck in quizzes, meet experts – and to soak up the joy of being with thousands of others who share their passions.

A decade before going boldly into the world of large-scale conventions, gamers were already assembling at Queen’s. From its inception, the convention has been run entirely by the Dragonslayers Society – itself one of the University’s oldest societies, with the inaugural meeting taking place in October 1984. As the Dragonslayers celebrates its 40th anniversary, it continues to have a finger firmly on the pulse of the gaming world, and that’s what has driven Q-Con’s remarkable growth, says former Dragonslayers President Ben Harrison (Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2004; PhD, 2010). “All we did was give the community what it wanted,” he says.

Joe McKinney, President of Dragonslayers Society

When Ben was elected President of Dragonslayers in 2003, he wanted to expand that community, applying the skills he and his team had learned organising networked PC game tournaments to role-playing games, video games and war games. Then, two years later in 2005, Harrison and the Q-Con team began noticing that a growing number of Dragonslayers were also very into anime. “Anime and games have a strong crossover, more through video games than role-playing. So we started to run anime screenings, and we knew that if you get the anime community interested, you start to interest the cosplay community as well. It's that sort of cross-pollination that’s helped us grow to our current size.”

TAKING FLIGHT

Andrew Gordon (Chemistry, 2008) joined Dragonslayers in his first week at Queen’s; Ben persuaded him to volunteer for Q-Con the following spring. It was perfect timing, says Andrew: “Around that time, everything that had been really uncool – fantasy, roleplaying, computer games – suddenly became cool again.” Attendance doubled, then doubled again. For Ben, Andrew and their fellow committee members, no idea was too ambitious.

“I loved Knightmare as a kid,” says Andrew. “It was a fantasy show on the BBC in the 90s where one person guides their friend through a CGI dungeon. My housemate at the time said: ‘Oh, it would be  easy to do that. All we need is a room, a camera, a green screen and some software.’ Well, his bit – writing the software – was easy.”

To run the game properly, the room needed to be enormous, so they persuaded Queen’s Film Theatre to give them the venue – for free. Next, a green screen had to be procured, not straightforward in 2006. “In the end, we got a bunch of six-by-four plywood boards and painted them green in the Students’ Union,” explains Andrew. “Then we had to carry these 12 green boards across University Road the day before to set them up. But it worked, and it was so much fun.”

L-R: Thomas McNeill, Thomas Green, Jay Radcliff (President 2019-2021) and Emily Monroe (Secretary 2022-2024).

They learned valuable lessons in using their initiative, such as the year they arrived at Mandela Hall to set up with 20 minutes to spare, only to find that someone had thrown a watermelon off the balcony at an event the night before.  (Watermelons, for the record, tend to explode on impact). Frenzied cleaning ensued. Then there was the time that the safe containing all the keys refused to open for the building security staff. “We had to get a man with a big drill to help them break it open,” remembers Andrew.

Every now and then, the police showed up to see why hundreds of kids were running around dressed as cartoon characters; they usually ended up joining in and happily posing with enthusiastic cosplayers.

Q-Con has even spawned its own jargon. If you ever hear a Dragonslayer refer to a ‘kitten-box problem’, be afraid. “A kitten-box problem is the worst kind of problem that is not a risk to life,” explains Ben. “One year, we were preparing for Q-Con, and a kind and well-meaning former executive of the society found a box of kittens abandoned in the goods yard of the Students’ Union. They brought them inside and gave them some milk and a blanket. However, the kittens did not remain in the box. We spent half a day chasing them away from areas that they most certainly should not have been in.” But that story thankfully has a happy ending: the kittens found a good home in a local animal sanctuary.

Joe McKinney (Medicinal Chemistry, First Year) is the current Dragonslayers president and has fond memories of another vaguely chaotic society event: Slayer’s 24. “That’s when we book the whole building for 24 hours and spend those 24 hours playing board games and video games. By the end everyone is pretty exhausted, but it is great fun to watch people completely break down and make decisions they would never normally make because they’re up for so long and are so out of it. At our most recent one, there were quite a few people slumped over the games trying to grab a few minutes’ sleep.”

For some, Dragonslayers and Q-Con have been a career springboard, thanks to development opportunities such as the 20-hour leadership training course committee members now have access to. “At my last birthday party, a former committee member came over and said: ‘Thanks for the leadership training, I just got promoted at work because of it,’” says Ben.

Tina Lauro Pollock (Archaeology and Palaeontology), a former President of Dragonslayers and member of the Q-Con organising committee, went on to found Brain and Nerd, a Belfast-based game developer. “In one of the early Q-Cons, there was a competition to design a computer game just using pen and paper,” she says. “I entered and won, and it made me think that I might have potential.”

A TRUE COMMUNITY

Geek culture – D&D, video games, fantasy and anime – is now a vast, global industry, Tina points out: “By joining societies like Dragonslayers and attending or volunteering at events like Q-Con, students can dip their toes in the water and just have a go. When we buy a game and we pay our £60, that money goes somewhere. Video games, after all, are now bigger than movies.”

Lyndsey Clarke

For others, the society offers a safe space to grow and challenge themselves. Tasha Montgomery (Master’s in Mathematics, 2016; PhD in Mathematics, 2023) is another former Dragonslayers President and Q-Con organising committee member. She remembers how the Tuesday night meet-ups helped her build confidence: “I have autism, so going to those events was daunting. But there was no pressure. I could sit there and play on a handheld console on my own, but still be in a group of people all doing their own thing. That helped build my confidence.

Some people might say we are weird nerds. But we’re happy being weird nerds!”

And perhaps that’s why the story of Dragonslayers and Q-Con will run and run: in this community, you can be yourself. “In Dragonslayers, there are a lot of like-minded individuals with similar hobbies to yourself,” explains Joe. “So, it’s good for making friends at uni, which is a new frontier after secondary school. People might have difficulty trying to fit in again.

You’ve never met someone before – but when you play Dungeons & Dragons games with them for a while, you become inseparable.”

Tasha recalls the feeling of moving through the crowds in her first-ever Q-Con in 2011: “There are these brief, bonding interactions. Seeing an independent artist who has created art from an anime you love. Seeing cosplayers from an obscure anime that you didn’t think anyone else was watching. It’s a split second of recognition and happiness – a burst of serotonin. It feels like everyone is there for the same thing: you aren’t the odd one out.”