Introduction

With most conferences, there are both positive and negative things that you can say about them. Without trying very hard, your editors at THG could spend the majority of their lives on the road bring you coverage from these events. With so many events it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and determine which conferences are the most important. The pace at these events is often very fast and there is not a lot of time to talk with people. You exchange business cards and promise to talk later, but the pace normally prohibits you from spending a lot of time in one place. This just isn't the case at GDC.

The Game Developers Conference is perhaps similar to a LAN Party, the most social event that we have ever attended. Everyone wants to spend vast amounts of time talking about what they are working on or what is in development. Most of the discussions surround the development of games or the technology/ tools that are used to develop games. Since I have been spending a lot of time lately bringing you the articles contained within the Games & Entertainment Guide , I have had my hand on the pulse of the gaming industry more than ever before. The sheer amount of technology that goes into the modern game is staggering. There are tools for everything under the sun and at GDC there is a mass of developers ready to listen to the pitches on the show floor.

As we suggested in our first report from GDC, which basically covered the launches from ATi and NVIDIA, DirectX 9 and shaders are all the rage from the hardware technology side, but you still can use a few tools to do the grunt work. These tools and technologies are in a competition for use in the next killer titles.

The laid back feel and slower pace of GDC provides for an exceptional experience where learning and exchanging information are the themes of the day. Let's take a look at what we saw at GDC.