4/01/2004 11:03:00 AM|||Travis|||

Foolin Around

So its April fools and that means nothing to me. Perhaps I could prank someone today if I put my mind to it. Or perhaps not. At anyrate, its been quite a while, once again.

GDC coincided with Spring Break, and so there was no drunken Mexican San-Felipe wild spring fling type things going on for Travis. Up in San Jose, driving back and forth between Yon's shitty apartment in Berkeley and the conference center on the 880. I thought only fat people could suffer massive cornary, but no, this highway was more congested than a 100 year old fat man. My mind alternated from anger, dispair and day dreaming as I saw little sleek crotch rockets zip in between the lanes of traffic. I could do that, I told myself. In fact, if there was traffic like that all around me, you better believe I would pick up one of those death machines... it could throw some excitement into your day. Weaving in between cars at 50 MPH while traffic is at a standstill... now that is cool. It makes it a bit harder to drink your coffee on the way to work, but the adrenaline is a nice substitute.

GDC was MASSIVE, about 10,000 peeps from what I heard. At 1,000 a pop, that is quite the wad of dough. Its worth it though. Not like I paid, but its worth it. I got a free pass in exchange for 20 hours of work. Not bad, that is like 50 an hour and that is good enough for me. Also you get immersed into summer camp, with games and such and lots of people to meet that spurn interesting conversations. All really cool. There was one game called witchhunt that I never played but should have- next year!

A great observation that I had was that the game industry is attracting more women. This is a great, marvelous wonderful thing. I was sitting with some buds in the info booth killing time with nothing to do but tell people that we wont give them a map and to oogle at girls. And the guy told me that in all his 12 years of working this thing, only in the last 2 has he been able to oogle women. So finally, the industy is maturing enough to where women can make games as well, and market them and do whatever it is that they do. Puzzle-type games for wirelesss? I heard many times that women gamers are not about the in your face competition that guys like, more about some adventure-type story or a puzzle type game like bedazzled.

In comparison to last year, this GDC was not nearly as exciting. Last year we talked with the sleezy record producer type guy, met with iGames and left with a feeling that we were going somewhere. This year, I am smart enough to know that was a false hope, and so I didn't want to set us up for failure and purposefully didn't try to lineup meetings. I now buy into the philosohpy of the great Asain military commander, Sun Tung who said that you have to KNOW your going to defeat your opponent well before the actual battle. So I see it with publishers- if I am not completely convinced that we can get a publishing deal, I won't even talk to them. If our stuff isn't top notch then I don't think its worth it. I mean, experience in pitching is nice, but if you are not certain that you can get a deal then you are just going to fail, and that hurts morale. Once we get our trailer and pitch down and we KNOW that we can get a publisher interested, then we move in with a force that even general Patton would be proud of.

Games, games games! One thing that I took away from the conference is that you need to play lots of games to make good ones, and we simply haven't been playing enough games. I am going to get a game culture going in our company... Saturday nights I think, are a great target. Every Saturday night we play some sort of game. Rise of Nations, Half-Life, Homeworld... whatever. It just kills me that we stopped playing games at some point but still want to make them. Electronic Arts doesnt even hire people who don't play games!

I think the best part of GDC was the talk where lots of studio heads came and talked about what it takes to make a successful studio. My favorite was Alex Gardener, who started Relic. Interesting note- even though they have not made a breakaway hit, their company is doing great. Its run well. He has good management. His best hires that he recalled? A COO and CFO. And now he has the Warhammer 40K licence. BASTARD! I wanted that licence! I loved that game as a kid, and now someone else gets to take that into computer land.

HUnmpghh

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