GDC 2007 Date, Initial Details Announced

Author: by Staff

The Game Developers Conference has announced its return to the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco on March 5th to 9th, 2007, opening its website and announcing initial speakers, sessions, and new events. This year’s theme for GDC (run by the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra) is “Take Control,”, and the speaker line-up, session descriptions, and attendee registration are available at the official GDC site. Press registration is also currently open. More than 12,500 game industry professionals, including 1,000 members of the working press, will convene during Game Developers Conference 2007, and the organizers have increased both the conference capacity and expo show floor size for this year’s event. Of the multitude of sessions already listed, highlights include 'Cross Application Asset Creation for Lair: From Characters to Clouds' by Factor 5's Mark Teare, 'Designing Gears of War: Iteration Wins' from Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, and 'PC Gaming in an Age of Connected Consoles' featuring David Edery (Microsoft), Warren Spector (Junction Point), Soren Johnson (Firaxis) and Michael Capps (Epic), among many others. Also highlighted as part of the Vision Track is 'Superfriends: Establishing a Solid Working Relationship Between Licensor and Licensee', with vice president of DC Comics Jim Lee and John Blakely, vice president of development for Sony Online Entertainment, talking about collaborating on the forthcoming DC Universe MMO. The event's keynotes and many other major lectures are yet to be announced. GDC 2007 will also see the addition of a new event on the Monday and Tuesday of the conference, the Independent Games Summit, in order to augment the popular and yearly Independent Games Festival with content relevant to the independent game creator. A special Indie-specific pass for the GDC is available, and more information on the Summit's content will appear in the near future. The GDC will feature more than 350 conference sessions, GDC Booth Crawl, Suite Night, East Meets West reception, and other dedicated networking events for developers, publishers, and serious, casual, and mobile companies. The week long event will feature the GDC Expo, GDC Mobile, the Serious Games Summit GDC, the Independent Games Festival (IGF), the Game Developers Choice Awards, and Game Connection.