It’s been a little while, and our big Game Developers Conference 2011 show is coming up pretty darn soon (early registration ends tomorrow!), so thought it might be time to sum up what I’ve been up to in recent months.
Firstly, GDC China went really well back in early December, and we managed to visit Beijing and Xi’An (the amazing Terracotta Army!), as planned, before the Shanghai show – here’s the inevitable Flickr gallery. China really is an amazing place, and I’m delighted that we’re doing business there – especially when we can bring a bunch of awesome Western and domestic speakers to the show and pack out lecture rooms.
Secondly, everything else is ticking along just fine, but it’s really GDC in San Francisco that’s on mine and my coworkers’ minds, since it’s the historic 25th GDC, and takes place in just a few weeks – from February 28th to March 4th, to be precise. Some of the things I’m most excited about regarding the show:
– The GDC 2011 Main Conference keynote is from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, on “Video Games Turn 25: A Historical Perspective and Vision for the Future”, and the GDC News page and the full schedule showcase an amazing amount of other high-quality talks, from Cliff Bleszinski through Deadly Premonition’s Swery to Chris Crawford and beyond.
– Another particular highlight is the recent revelation of the Classic Postmortem lecture series, which has an all-star line-up of game developers, from John Romero (Doom) through Will Wright (Raid On Bungeling Bay) to Toru Iwatani (Pac-Man) and beyond, presenting accounts on the making of some of the most famous video games of all time. Man, this’ll be fun.
– Some really cute promotion for the show this year, too, with the debut of the GD-Bot, pictured above. As we noted: “Mailed to thousands of prospective GDC attendees in special packaging, the specially perforated paper sections, graphic designed by Stephanie Tang and papercraft-ized by Cubeecraft.com, can be assembled into our friendly Game Developers Conference-themed robot.” And if you didn’t get one in the mail, you can download a PDF.
– Oh, and we hired an official GDC historian for the 25th show, in the form of Jason Scott, who you might know for his Textfiles.com digital archive and great documentaries like BBS Documentary and Get Lamp. His work to date with the masses of audio and video we sent him has been amazing.
So that’s what I’m getting excited about at work – incidentally, as the bio page notes, I’ve been promoted and I’m now an EVP at UBM TechWeb, our parent company, still dealing with overseeing all of the video game-related portfolio, as I did before.
As for outside of work, I’m carrying on with the ‘vintage computer’ art-related collecting, with this IBM 7094 print a particular highlight of late, alongside a Robert Tinney piece. Oh, and I have my first Grordbort insect, too. Fun times! More soon…