When a couple meets while playing World of Warcraft, you can all but guarantee that when they tie the knot they’re going to have a video game themed wedding! Hanneke and Duncan were married in Bristol in September.
“We love organising parties and having friends over, and we wanted to do just that, but on a larger scale, for our wedding”, said the bride. “It was very important for us that our guests had fun and felt relaxed. The morning was more formal and dressed up, because we did want to have a sense of gravitas for our actual ceremony, but we had most fun and put most creativity into organising the evening party.”
The day was split into two parts with the ceremony in the morning, and the party later that evening. “In the morning we had coffee, tea and pastries at Hotel du Vin with our ceremony guests, walked to the Registry Office for the ceremony, and then went back to Hotel du Vin for a three course lunch. For our party in the evening, we hired Dundry Village Hall as we live two doors down from it and we got a villagers’ discount! It also meant we could have the after party at our house after the village hall closed at 11.30.”
The food was important to this couple and in the evening they served street food rather than having a formal sit down meal. “We both love street food, and Bristol is famous for it, so we’d wanted to recreate a mini food market at our party”, she continued. “It was a great excuse to visit a lot of street food markets and trying out all the wonderful food stalls in Bristol. Unfortunately, it proved much more difficult than we expected to find street food vendors that met our requirements, understood what we wanted and were willing to cater at the party. In the end we managed to book Lovett Pies and dessert in the form of ice cream by Lucille’s Caravan.”
Their video game/ Super Mario theme was mostly in the decor at their party and the entertainment they laid on for their guests. “We put together a couple of a video game stations and had a competition for the golden Mario. We put a Mario question mark box on each table with things in it like nerf guns, for which we’d set up some targets so tables could compete against each other.”
“We had guest bingo cards to entertain our guests which had generic facts on such as ‘Played World of Warcraft’, ‘Speaks another language’, ‘Has met royalty’ etc. Our guests then had to find other guests who could do, or had done, the things on their bingo card to tick off a square. We had prizes for the first, second and third!”
“Almost all the decorations in the village hall were DIY. We found branches that we painted silver and set in concrete, me and my sister cut circles out of card and sewed them together as garlands to hang from the trees and to use as a backdrop. My sister in law bought flowers and put together some arrangements to put on the outside tables and bar.”
“There’s nothing we’d change about our wedding in the grand scheme of things”, Hanneke concluded. “However if you want to niggle over small details, we probably wouldn’t bother with the cheap digital cameras on the tables. The quality of the pictures wasn’t great and everyone was taking much better pictures with their phone cameras anyway, plus we had a great professional photographer!”
