EA CEO Calls Spore The Greatest Creative Risk In The Industry

The Into The Pixel art showcase at DICE featured plenty of wonderful artwork from beloved games like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life 2 and Rayman's Raving Rabbids, each up for auction. The piece that looked to grab the biggest bucks was the Viva PInata digital painting seen above, which closed at $1400. The winner? None other than Epic Games' Mark Rein, who hovered near the bidding sheet like a hungry wolf until the auction closed, growling at anyone who attempted to outbid him. My choice? It would've been the Team Fortress 2 piece seen after the jump.

Riccitiello On How Not To Blow It, The EA Way

Bullfrog, Origin Systems, and Westwood Studios rank as some of the best development houses of all time. They also happen to represent three of EA's most spectacular failures. "We at EA blew it," said EA CEO John Riccitiello at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this morning, "To a degree, I was involved in those things, so I blew it."

While Riccitiello was proud of his achievements at EA following his return to the company, he warned developers and publishers not to make some of the mistakes the company has made in the past. Those mistakes, he said, involved the stifling of creative talent and their ensuing departure.

Riccitiello took DICE attendees to school this morning with his talk on Game industry Economics 101. EA, like Activision, Sony, Microsoft, will continue to absorb developers, as it did with Bioware Pandemic last year. And that presents a danger.

Afro Samurai Trailer Makes Surprise Appearance At DICE

Like Afro Samurai? Excited about the Namco Bandai console game of the same name? Buddy, have we got the ghetto captured, shaky-cam video for you. During Roger Hector's DICE presentation today, the VP of Development at Namco Bandai Games showed off the first trailer for the game, which looks to stay true to the series' trademark art style. Hector showed off work in progress versions of Afro, in 2D and 3D form, a transition the character seemed to make with ease. Hopefully, we'll get a direct feed version of the above clip soon and put this whole bush league video capture job behind us.

Mizuguchi: I'm Too Artistic, I Know

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, founder of Q Entertainment and best known for his work on Rez, Space Channel 5 and Lumines took the stage at DICE today to talk about the future of gaming and give attendees a quick history lesson on all things MIzuguchi. His talk, titled "Art vs. Commerce" focused on his career-long struggle to balance the artistic and the fiscally responsible. From the wildly successful Sega Rally—which sold 20,000 full-sized arcade units and 1.5 million on consoles and PCs—to the commercial underperformer Rez—a game for which he declined to offer sales data.

Mizuguchi explained he was inspired by games at a young age, fascinated by Atari's dedicated Pong platform. He says he also discovered the music of The Beatles at the same time, combining the two experiences in a visual and emotional way.

Microsoft's Shane Kim Says The Console War Isn't Over

Microsoft Game Studios head Shane Kim was on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from the New York Times' Seth Schiesel today at DICE. He probed the VP on a number of topics ranging from Bungie's decision to go independent to who's winning the console war to Microsoft's potential entry into the portable gaming market.

Schiesel began his line of questioning by addressing some of the Microsoft's talent losses over the past year, specifically inquiring into the departure of star developer Bungie. "I think that was a case of a creative team really wanting to just be independent," he said, brushing off rumors that the team felt creatively stifled, saying "No studio had more creative freedom within Microsoft than Bungie."

On the rest of the departures, Kim called those acquisitions "the nature of the industry", explaining that the company doesn't dictate what other publishers do.

Blizzard Entertainment execs—Mike Morhaime, CEO and Co-Founder, Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design, and Frank Pearce, Executive VP of Product Development—took the stage this morning at DICE to talk about the company's history "From Developer To Worldwide Publisher." The three spent a good portion of their "conversation" talking about one of the aspects that makes Blizzard unique, their commitment to quality and gameplay above all else.

The team also revealed a list of the Blizzard games that have been canceled over the course of their 17 years, a list longer than you may think.

Gore Verbinski Kicks Off DICE With Peppy, Often Clueless Keynote

DICE Rolls Out In Vegas Today

The Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain Summit, simply known as DICE, kicks off today and I'm currently en route via rented Chevy Impala to the Red Rocks Resort in Las Vegas to cover it. Scheduled to appear and say interesting things are EA CEO John Riccitiello, Microsoft Game Studios VP Shane Kim, Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Morhaime and many, many more. While not in the habit of making surprise game announcements, these industry folks always have something attention (and headline) grabbing to say.

Coinciding with the DICE Summit are the 11th Interactive Achievement Awards, the industry's prestigious, peer-recognized award ceremony. If you want to watch the awards live, they'll be broadcast on Comcast HD Video on Demand and streamed live on GameSpot. For all the information on this year's events, check out the full press release.

When we broke the news of Jim Ward quitting LucasArts last week, I mentioned that he would no longer be speaking at the DICE conference this week.

The folks at Kohnke weren't able to tell me who would be taking his place, but today when I hopped onto the DICE site I see he is no longer listed and that there have been a number of changes to the line-up. It looks like Oddworld's Lorne Lanning is also no longer speaking at the conference and that folks from Namco and Massive Black have been added.

Hit the jump for the before and afters, according to the DICE schedule. (Thanks to GameLife, which ran the old schedule last week and made it possible for me to do some comparisons.)

LucasArts president Jim Ward surprised the developer on Monday with news that he was leaving the company he's been with for nearly ten years.

In a prepared statement sent to Kotaku shortly after we broke the news of his departure, Ward sang the praises of a game development company he says he's helped reboot.

"I am so proud of all people and the work we've done together at LucasArts over the last four years," he wrote. "It's been an incredible experience. Together we've rebooted the company and set LucasArts on a path to even greater success. This is a fantastic team and they are positioned for their best year ever."