In 1996 I started working with a TV character generator named Antero (running on SGI machines) for sports broadcasting. It came with a rough automation system with examples in perl 4. I started writing an automated statistic system around it for basketball just for the fun of it, until it became a reasonable demonstrator.
So in 1998 I finally led computer graphics programming and display automation system for Football (soccer if you want) World Cup, though the main GUI was finally in visual basic (iiiirk) and the statistic management GUI in Java, it achieved to convince me of Perl's superiority :)