Organizers of
Game Developers Conference 2011 are reminding that the deadline to
save 35% on passes to the upcoming event in San Francisco is Monday, January 24th at 11.59pm PT.
As the
overall session list for the February/March five-day event spans over 500 speakers and hundreds of sessions, and GDC's Expo show floor reaches
more than 150 exhibitors, organizers are pointing out the following show highlights:
- A large range of
key one- and two-day Summits, including Social & Online Games, Smartphone Games, Independent Games, Serious Games/Gamification and more, will kick off GDC week on Monday, February 28th and Tuesday, March 1st.
These innovative and informative programs are led by advisory boards of industry experts, and speakers include notables from Zynga, Google, the Humble Indie Bundle, MIT, Klei Entertainment, and many more. Monday and Tuesday also see
major tutorials, spanning the Game Design Workshop through a Microsoft Kinect developer day.
- The GDC 2011 Main Conference takes place on Wednesday, March 2nd to Friday, March 4th and features
discipline-specific Tracks specially filtered by the event's
expert Advisory Board, and dedicated to programming, design, art, audio, business and management, and production.
The GDC 2011 Main Conference keynote is
from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, on "Video Games Turn 25: A Historical Perspective and Vision for the Future", and the
GDC News page and specific track pages mention a multitude of Main Conference highlights, which include
Epic's Cliff Bleszinski through
GDC founder Chris Crawford and beyond.
- Wednesday night of GDC 2011 sees the
11th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premiere awards show by game creators for game creators, with Tim Schafer hosting and special honorees including Peter Molyneux. The ceremony is preceded by the
13th Annual Independent Games Festival Awards, and both are open to all GDC passholders.
- Other highlights of this year's show include a dedicated
Game Career Seminar day, the return of
GDC's poster sessions, the IGF Pavilion, a special GDC Career Pavilion and Business Center, and the business matching of Game Connection @ GDC, plus the
recent revelation of the Classic Postmortem lecture series.
In the eleven Classic Postmortem lectures specially lined up for the 25th iteration of Game Developers Conference, an all-star line-up of game developers, from John Romero (
Doom) through Will Wright (
Raid On Bungeling Bay) to Toru Iwatani (
Pac-Man) and beyond, presenting accounts on the making of some of the most famous video games of all time - a never to be repeated lecture series.
Game Developers Conference 2011 -- the 25th iteration of the industry-leading show and part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website -- will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from February 28th to March 4th.
As mentioned above,
early reduced-price registration is open only until January 24th at 11.59pm PT. For more information on all aspects of the show, visit
the official GDC 2011 website.
