GDC Adds Heroes' Alexander, Prototype Creators

Author: by Staff

Game Developers Conference executive director Jamil Moledina has started a new weblog on the official GDC website, revealing new GDC 2008 talks from Heroes executive producer Jesse Alexander and Radical's Prototype co-creators. The 'Director's Cut' section of the weblog is slated to run regularly under the GDC 2008 show itself (part of CMP, as is Gamasutra), and Moledina's first entry reads, in part: "I'm pleased to announce that Jesse Alexander, executive producer of the breakout hit TV show Heroes will be giving a talk on creating each season of that show. I've found Jesse to be incredibly passionate about his work, while at the same time he recognizes the achievements and challenges of game development. Having been involved in the game adaptation of Alias, he has not only applied those lessons to his transmedia approach to Heroes content across TV, web, comics, and games, but also to the creation of serial content on the Heroes TV show itself. While transmedia is an important growing trend between Hollywood and games, when Jesse told me he uses game development processes in managing the writing on Heroes, that struck me as a process very much ahead of the curve, and worth greater elaboration. So that is the focus of Jesse's talk. Here's a link to the session, live as of today: How Heroes Are Made: A Collaborative Approach to Serialized Content in a Transmedia World Another development in games that's attracted our interest was Radical Entertainment's Prototype. Part of GDC's charter is to highlight breakthroughs in game development, and members of our advisory board had noticed the design of this game. I had the chance to meet the team at Leipzig, and it was clear that executive producer Tim Bennison and lead designer Eric Holmes have taken the new generation challenge and produced gameplay that more closely mimics true behavior. In kind of a pre-mortem of the unreleased game, the team has agreed to discuss the choices they made, the experiments and the evolutionary dead ends they iterated through in order to arrive at their preferred result. This should be interesting from both design and production execution perspectives. Here's the link to the freshly posted session: Prototype: Open World, Open Mind, Next Generation Thinking." Game Developers Conference 2008 itself is scheduled for February 18th-22nd 2008 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco - more information is available at the official show website.