Game Developers Conference 2007

Last week was crazy. I spent most of it at GDC, the largest annual event in the videogame industry. As I mentioned in a previous post, I went to GDC to both compete in the Student Finalist Showcase (10 games out of 102 submitted made the cut; our game Euclidean Crisis was one of these), and to advance Roblox’s bid for world domination.

GDC is a week-long event that boasts expo halls (3), info sessions, lectures, tutorials, round table discussions, awards ceremonies and good old fashioned demos. This year GDC was held in San Francisco, which meant it was an easy train ride away for me and my friends.

Team Euclidean Crisis went up to SF Tuesday afternoon to setup our exhibit booth. We got to meet and greet the other finalists, some of whom had flown in from the far-flung edges of the world, places like the Netherlands, Finland and Vienna. Various members of the team hung out at our exhibit area talking about EC with random passerbys. One russian guy came by and spoke with us about our game for 20 minutes, and offered us some good design advice. Later that evening at the GDC awards ceremony, we saw the same guy walk up on stage to receive a life-time achievement award for his pioneering vision in casual games development. He was none other than Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris. The next day he came back to our booth to show his friend our game. I guess he really liked it. Maybe he’ll copy our idea and you’ll see an EC clone on XBox Live someday.

GDC awards night was held on Wednesday evening and it was ridiculous. Everyone in the industry who is anyone was there. The Student Showcase event, sponsored by DigiPen, was won by a team from DigiPen, for their game Toblo (from DigiPen). This was pretty egregious since there was another student game that was clearly the best – The Blob – a Katamari-like game from the Netherlands team. Awards were also given to industry games. The Gears of War team cleaned up – I think they won several awards including Game of the Year. Shigeru Miyamoto was also onstage a lot, collecting a small pile of awards for Wii Sports and a Lifetime Achievement award. For those not in the know, Miyamoto is the genius behind Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, and Zelda. Respect!

After a hard night of shouting and making a ruckus at the GDC awards ceremony, we really wanted to just go back to the bar in our hotel and play Magic (free cards from WotC? Best expo swag evar). I think the poor sap in this photo won one game all night. Incidentally, this is my friend Doug, who was covering GDC for Gamespot (which is cool because a Press pass lets you cut lots of long lines at GDC). His best article of the week was about the annual Game Development Contest, where top industry designers take some absurd idea and try to design a game around it.

Members of Roblox came up for GDC too. Someone different came up each day. Team EC had dinner with Builderman. Matt and I went to go see Steve Jackson give a vacuous presentation on blindtesting (come on Steve…). Erik and I attended an interesting round table presentation on virtual worlds.

The Eve Online founders gave the best presentation of the whole week – a discussion on the inner workings of their backend architecture.

Thousands lined up to hear the prophet Shigeru Miyamoto speak.

IBM doesn’t care who wins the console wars – they back all major players.

San Francisco in the spring. Just outside the convention center.

We have a lot of friends in the city. Walking back to the train one night we randomly ran into some.

GDC: GG!