When Gamecock invited me to their coming out party at GDC this year I hearkened back to their days as Gathering of Developers and knew the party would be something to behold: I was not disappointed.

Shortly after 8 p.m. the doors opened at The Regency Center and we were escorted upstairs to the top floor, a place once used as a Masonic Temple to perform secret rituals. The entrance room was wood paneled and had a small fire going in a large fireplace.

The building and room was about 100 years old we were told, and their were stories of untimely deaths and perhaps a ghost or two.

The main party unraveled in the floor's central room with the help of a traveling band of Burning Man performers.

The cavernous room had walls of walnut and red felt, a blood red carpet and at one end a stage filled with a fantastic scene made of canvas and copper, paint and more than a bit of hell.

In the three-layered scene that stretched along the full length of the wall devils, serpents and the damned peopled the subterranean bowels of some piece of the underworld.

The music, performed by clown bass players, clown drummers and a clown keyboardist, throbbed, shaking the walls and floor of the former Masonic Lodge.

A whore circus of psychotic clown prostitutes cavorted in the room. Women in brassy blonde wigs, Crow make-up and fishnet stockings wiggled and Go-Go-ed on top of tables. A woman with white make-up and a red nose and dressed in candy cane leggings and an American flag shirt, tap danced loudly atop a piano resting in the center of the floor. Nearby a woman in bunny ears and a pink tutu quietly sipped a Martini. Above another woman dangled and swung from a trapeze.

It was the sort of scene that seemed destined to end with half of the crowd turning into vampires and the other half being consumed at midnight. But it went until 4 a.m. and the worst thing that happened was that we ran out of booze. Brian Crecente

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