Feature: 'Gangs of GDC: Rumble in the Moscone Center'

In this latest exclusive Gamasutra feature, officials from casual game developer GameLab (Diner Dash) offer a postmortem on Gangs Of GDC, which the company describes as "the world’s first... massively multiplayer mobile phone fighting game or MMMPFG." In this excerpt, Gamelab's Gregory Trefry and Mattia Romeo describe the meat of this unique game, which was developed for play during the 2007 Game Developers Conference: “Gangs of GDC was the world’s first (as far as we know) massively multiplayer mobile phone fighting game or MMMPFG. While the genre-name may be complicated, the game itself was actually pretty simple and straightforward. The theme was that rival gangs such as the Match Three Boyz and the MMOFOs are vying for control of the GDC by fighting over three neighborhoods scattered throughout the conference center. Each neighborhood consisted of a large flat-screen display set up in a high traffic area of the conference showing a grid of nine blocks. Players would dial up a number displayed on the screen and be immediately placed on one of the blocks where they would either fight any rivals that were on the block or else flip the block over to their gang’s control. When fights occurred players resolved them through a simple rock-paper-scissors game where they pressed 1, 2 or 3 on their cell-phones to perform a light jab, a strong upper-cut or a devastating roundhouse respectively. Every five minutes each neighborhood would be scored and the gang that controlled the most blocks in a neighborhood would gain points for each block they controlled.” You can read the entire feature here, including more from Gamelab describing the development of Gangs of GDC, as well as what went right and wrong in its implementation at the most recent GDC.