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Computer Game Developers' Conference 1998 Report

This year, the Long Beach Conference Center hosted the CGDC. This was unusual, since the conference usually takes place in San Jose, as I was told. A lot of people seemed to have complained, and next year, it will be back in the old place. I enjoyed every minute in Long Beach, though. It is a beautiful city, and the conference center has everything an event of this size needs.

The looks of the conference were excellent. Everywhere you went, banners with the CGDC logo could be seen. The information displays were stylish, as was the conference program booklet. And then there were advertisement banners from several companies related to game development. But that did not hurt at all, on the contrary.

At the beginning of the conference, there was a bit of a chaos, though. There appeared to be problems with handing out the conference badges. A lot of people, including I, had not received theirs by mail. But waiting became a pleasure with all those interesting persons around. I talked to a lady from SquareSoft and a cool guy from Logitech, who was really depressed due to the fact that Logitech had cancelled the opening night party. After these obstacles were out of the way, everything went as smooth as it could: The Conference Associates really did an outstanding job.

Most of the classes and roundtables I attended were all really interesting and much too short. I focused on two toics: Getting into the Game Industry and Artificial Intelligence. Although I had expected a lot from the roundtables relating the the former, I was mostly disappointed. In my opinion, there was a lot of hollow talk from people who wanted to appear superior; rather than giving advice, they merely discouraged the ones that wanted to enter the business. I was far more successful in gathering information and making contacts by hanging out at the job fair and at the parties. The best way to make your way into a company, though, is to directly talk to a designer or programmer that is actually working on a project. If you can make him interested in you, you have just made one big step forward. And that is what I did, I think.

The AI roundtables were as good as they can get, though, especially the roundtables hosted by Steve Woodcock, and the presentation of SOAR by John E. Laird. Just the tutorial that I attended was aimed too much at beginning level programmers, who were virtually not present.

It was hosted by a pretty famous guy, though: Matt Pritchard, the Lead Programmer responsible for Age of Empires, and that alone made the tutorial already worth its time.

There were other celebrities as well, among them Sid Meier, Dave Perry and Ron Gilbert. There was also a funny display with child pictures and quotes of Chris Taylor, Dani Berry, and Josh White, for example.

Here are the quotes:

"Look at all this free food, do you think they will mind if I swipe some for the guys back at the office?"
Chris Taylor
"My best friendships in this biz all started at the CGDC!"
Dany Berry
"Actually, like winter solstice parties, CGDC is where games are conceived. The actual birth happens a few months later."
Josh White

The last quote, of course, refers to the CGDC motto "where games are born." It was really easy to start a chat with virtually anybody at the conference. Lunch was a particularly good time to do so: You just looked for a nearly full table, asked if a seat was vacant, and sat down. And then the chat started, almost automatically. The food was good, too, and it was free, as Mr. Taylor noticed above.

The classes and roundtables provided a good place for a technical chat. I talked to a Designer at LucasArts, the Lead Programmer of Kalisto, some guys working on DirectX at Microsoft, a bunch of people from Psygnosis, and a lot of other people. I also had a short talk with a group from Ion Storm. The second guy from the left, by the way, is Warren Spector, I believe. It's been an unbelievable experience.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the CGDC '99, but I will try to be back in the year 2000. And maybe I'll also be at the Develop! 1998 in Great Britain. I guess I am a conference addict now.

Greetings fly to: Stéphane Bura (Kalisto), Jason Chein (Freelance Gaming Studio), Adrian Dalecki (Village Tronic), John Fredrickson, Christoph Graham (Compaq), Rich Holdsworth (Psygnosis), Alexandre Jean-Claude (Softimage), Kevin Larkin (Microsoft), Gareth Morgan (Softimage), Greg Rusu (AMD), Pierre Tousignant (Softimage), and, last not least, Steven Woodcock.