gdc 2018

Epic flew a bunch of Twitch streamers out to GDC to stream Fortnite on a big screen. And ride a mechanical llama. Streamer Pookieface told me that the experience has been kinda nerve-wracking, but she eventually found her groove and won a victory royale, to big crowd applause. “It’s more of an adrenaline rush, and you…

After Atari was acquired by Warner in the 1980s, the new chief executive it installed called the game designers “a bunch of high-strung prima donnas” in an interview. Atari’s designers retaliated with this shirt. On display at GDC Retro Play this week.

The shittiest kidnap van I’ve ever seen was doing laps around GDC all today. I guess if you want to kidnap kids you spray-paint “Free Candy” on the van but this is what you do if you want to lure in tech bros? When it fills up do they drive them straight to Burning Man?

Why is Sonic blue? Because Sega’s logo is blue. A simple answer to one of life’s great mysteries. From the Sonic panel currently ongoing at GDC.

Harold Halibut is an adventure game where everything is handmade. “Almost every object you see in the game exists in real life,” one of the game’s developers told me during an Xbox event at GDC yesterday. The demo I played felt like a streamlined take on standard point-and-click adventuring (with some worrisomely…

What The Golf is my favorite game of GDC so far. Its developers assert that golf is boring, so they’ve made tons of tiny levels that turn the sport on its head. The game is riotously funny. In one level, I scored a “hole-in-one” by launching a typical golf hole into a giant 1-shaped crater. Another gave me, playing as…

Game Workers Unite is a fledgling effort to get game devs unionized that’s formed around this year’s GDC. The organization was born of discussion surrounding an upcoming roundtable on unionization to be hosted by the International Game Developers Association, which has expressed controversial views on the subject in…

Sign of the times. As I emerged from a panel at GDC in San Francisco, I saw a huge line that wrapped around itself, easily the biggest I’ve seen at GDC so far. Curious, I decided to see which presentation it was for. The sign at the door read “Making Indie Games That Sell.”