San Francisco for GDC

In all fairness it’s probably not the geekiest convention on earth, yet the 2005 Game Developers Conference definitely had its fair share of “fat-beards” (a term coined by one of our artists to describe the portly geek with a Dungeon Master stink).

There were plenty of straight laced and trendy artsy types too of course. Moving past Norwegian ubber coders, through a dense crowd of Japanese dudes with crazy beehive hair, sauntering past muttering Brits, and having French yelled over head, there’s no forgetting how global the game industry is. Game developers of all shapes and sizes from all over the world were in San Francisco last week to discuss how to make better games… including a sizable contingent from harmonix… mmm… but we’re all cool cats of course. ;)

The “Experimental Games Workshop” session was the highlight, each year it hosts twenty or so innovative games – be they commercial, independent or student projects. Our game Eyetoy:AntiGrav went down well, and there were was some serious innovation and creativity on display.

The crowd fave was definitely Ragdoll Kung Fu – info, movies and screens:
Ragdoll Kung Fu

Carnegie Mellon University’s experimental gameplay project was also packed with fun microgames – download them here: www.experimentalgameplay.com

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of one session! GDC was packed with far too many amazing talks to cover here... but I can't neglect to mention Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi’s inspiring talk:
Keita Takahashi gamespot.com coverage

Invigorating and inspirational, GDC was also a great excuse to check out San Franciso. On our lecture free day Jason, who I roomed with, and I checked out the SF Giants ballpark (open to the public for free), took the views from the Coet Tower and of course visited the Golden Gate Bridge. After a long Boston winter of snow storms and constant below 0 (degrees C) temperatures, the sun and temperatures that peaked at 87 degree F were seriously welcome.