Game Developers Conference 2003 was held 4–8 March (including the Tutorials held 4–5 March) at the San Jose Convention Center in (strangely enough) San Jose, CA. For the first time since 1997 (I think) I attended the entire conference (last year Sara and I spent an hour or so in the Lobby Bar but went to no other venues, parties, or sessions).
I had planned to spend the first two days of GDC at GDC Mobile. But I discovered that my badge didn't allow that. Fortunately, I also discovered that there was only 1 hour of programming in those two days that I really wanted to attend.
So my first day at GDC was spent primarily in the Story Tutorial (All Stories Great and Small) led by Lee Sheldon. While interesting (I particularly enjoyed Nate Fox, designer of Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus, who provided some memorable quotes), I was surprised to note that much of the discussion is the same as we were having a decade (or a decade and a half) ago on fora like GEnie and Lilan. I did, however, absolutely love Lee's list of source material to look at (novels, movies, etc.).
I was scheduled for a lunch with potential working partners but they were at GDC Mobile and therefore at another location. We decided to meet instead that evening at the Fairmont Hotel. Lunch was provided by the conference (boxed sandwiches with pasta salad and brownies) and achieved tolerable but no better. I resolved to eat out (after all, I know the restaurants in the area pretty well) for lunch whenever possible. At lunch I wandered into a conversation between Noah Falstein and J.C. Herz which wandered over fascinating topics including DARPA, tele-presence in Afghanistan, the Special Forces wish list, and a variety of others. The variety of people in our business never ceases to amaze me.
After bailing slightly early because I had to make a run to Fry's Electronics to return stuff (and pick up a couple of things) I went back to the Fairmont where there was a graze-and-schmooze going on associated with GDC Mobile. There I had the pleasure of meeting several interesting people and re-acquainting myself with others, including Scott Wallin with whom I worked on Centurion: Defender of Rome a lot of years ago. After a hour or so (it could have been two for all I know) a few of us wandered out to Original Joe's for late dinner and more discussions.
The second day was devoted to Microsoft's sponsored DirectX Tutorial. Unfortunately, their speakers included some of the worst public speakers I've ever heard at a conference. Both morning and afternoon sessions I found myself next to someone snoring (in the morning, the large snoree awoke after perhaps 20 minutes to say "Zees chaires, zey are terrible" — evidently not terrible enough to keep us all awake, though). I skipped out of the second half of the installer talk, came back late from lunch, and didn't ever come back from the afternoon coffee/snack break. Partly I found the material tedious because I don't have the background in DirectX necessary to appreciate the subject matter, but partly it was because being a good geek doesn't necessarily make you a good public speaker. Frankly, the basic subject matter in Metric Lighting was deeply interesting. After the sessions I talked to Chris Donohue and got him to agree to send me his recommendations for books to learn DirectX by — in the meantime I have the DX9 SDK CD I got for attending (part) of this Tutorial.
Lunch was a trip to Iguana's with "the guys" from Adobe (not all with Adobe anymore, of course). We hung around for quite awhile and set another lunch date for Thursday.
After leaving class in the four o'clock range, I hung out in the Lobby Bar and had talks with people from my past like Tim Brengle (who was my boss at EA), Ray Greer (formerly of Hero Games and Hero Software), and my ex-wife, Nicky Robinson. That last one wasn't exactly by choice, but I survived it.
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