Crestwood welcomes the Southeast’s first ever eSports arena at the Crestwood Festival Center in Birmingham, filling 18,000 square feet with gaming and virtual reality. The Magic City ePLEX features top-of-the-line HP Omen PCs and consoles, as well as VR racing simulators from a Birmingham-based Nemesis Lab. EO member Dan Pahos is the co-owner of the venue that’s “not only the first of its kind in Alabama, but across the Southeast.”  

The Magic City ePlex is open seven days a week, and offers gaming tournaments, league play, and team-building experiences for corporate outings. Dan Pahos says that the top-end equipment, combined with a gigabit internet connection, is a huge selling point because players have a ping latency of 5 ms or less.

To kick off the grand opening of Magic City ePLEX, students from across Alabama were invited to compete in the first-ever Alabama High School Athletic Association eSports State Championship. It’s a great opportunity for kids to compete in school activities when they normally would not have the chance. The first year of AHSAA eSports in 2018, 403 students across Alabama competed. Of those 403 students, 350 of them had never participated in an extracurricular activity at school.

The team has already started construction on a second ePLEX in Pearl, Mississippi.