The Game Developer's Conference was held last week in San
Jose, California with some 5,000 attendees. Contrasted to E3's 40,000+ crowd, GDC feels
like a comfy and intimate conference. Although GDC largely remains a hardware show for 3D
card manufacturers such as 3DFX, ATI, S3, and Nvidia, there were a few new titles on
display including early versions of Unreal Tournament, Drakken, Quake 3 Arena, and
Homeworld. I sifted through all the clutter and came up with The Gist of It for GDC:
Shadow Man
Think of an eclectic cross between Heretic II and Gabriel Knight and you'll begin to see
the potential in Acclaim and Iguana UK's Shadow Man, an impressive 3rd person
3D shooter due for PC, N64 and PSX later this year. Acclaim has always been a
console-first company, but Shadow Man was designed from the ground-up for the PC, and it's
3D-accelerated engine is stunning with rich vistas, reactive animation, and atmospheric
sound. Based on the comic book of the same name, you play a hired assassin who has the
unique ability of being able to cross over to the Deadside and become the Shadow Man, an
immortal voodoo warrior. Incredibly cinematic in-game cut scenes are blended with
beautiful locations to create a rich visual tapestry for the game. This was definitely a
game that caught me off guard and is easily the best new game I saw at the show. Shadow
Man has been in development for years, but it is looking better than ever. Keep an eye out
for this one.
IGF Festival
Kudos to the Independent Game Festival that awarded its grand prize to a game called Fire
and Darkness from a group of College Freshmen who spent three years programming what they
bluntly refer to as "Total Annihilation in 3D." It was heartening to hear these
developers admit that they "quadrupled their budget" just to fly out to GDC.
Another impressive game in the IGF festival was Resurrection, one of the first turn-based
strategy games that has impressed me. The trick? The turns are only ten seconds long,
which is just enough time to think, yet doesn't slow the game down to Chess-like speed.
Resurrection is sort of a hybrid of Mindsweeper with Capture the Flag, and looks
impressive – it was programmed entirely by two California engineers. Although both
games don't have a publisher as of yet, there's no doubt there will be big news about both
in the coming months. I can't wait to see the entries for the IGF next year –
And please guys, let's kill the education and full motion video products from the finalist
group.
and 
3dfx
Is 3DFX an advertising company or a chip company? It unveiled a new logo at GDC last week
along with some exciting and incredibly beautiful TV commercials that promote the 3DFX
brand. Totaled together, 3DFX pumped some $20 million into their new branding campaign.
The only problem is that they had no new technology to announce. Although Voodoo 3 has a
new package design (with the eyes of a model starring at the consumer), is 3DFX trying to
put up a smoke screen for the lack of 32-bit color in Voodoo 3? The advertising is great,
but it's almost as if 3DFX is concentrating on their brand for the first half of 1999 in
the mainstream since they don't have a particularly competitive high-end 3D board. It's
amazing that a year ago 3DFX was at the top of its class, and at GDC they were almost
regarded as being old news. Of course in the graphics chip business things can change
overnight, and although their marketing is smart, it might not be enough to keep Nvidia at
bay.
The GDC Parties
Sega had a surprisingly strong showing at GDC for the DreamCast and threw an incredible
party at San Jose's Club Echo for industry types featuring the soulful sounds of George
Clinton and The P.Funk Orchestra. Playing for what must have been almost three hours
straight, Clinton and his band were a sight to behold as Sega handed out all the food,
drink, and DreamCast-branded cigars you wanted. The next night Microsoft DirectX threw a
party which could be classified at the opposite end of the spectrum – Not too hot.
Soul Coughing (I know I know, 'Who?') performed to what must have been an audience
of about 100 people as the rest of the guests stood in a hallway and chatted it up. Where
was George Clinton when Microsoft needed him?
Nvidia Riva TNT 2
If there's one big success story in the graphics chip business this year, it has got to be
Nvidia. A year ago they had a somewhat competitive chip in the Riva 128, but the Riva TNT
finally started to go head-to-head with the Voodoo 2 in terms of performance and image
quality. Well, last week Nvidia announced the Riva TNT 2 which will ship later this month,
and it looks to blow the roof off 3D card performance on the PC. With 32-bit color, 32
megs of ram, and flawless image quality, Nvidia's TNT 2 is going to be the standard for 3D
gaming on the PC for the next few months. To Nvidia's credit, they are signing game
developers up to their "High I.Q." quarterly program to promote games that work
great on Nvidia hardware. This quarter's game is Expendable from Rage Software (creators
of Incoming). Bravo to Nvidia. If you are planning on getting a 3D accelerator
during the first half of 1999, the TNT2 is clearly the leading contender.
Miyamoto Keynote
While Sega and Sony duked it out with keynotes promoting their future technology and
market dominance, Nintendo took a higher road and brought Shigeru Miyamoto in as the
keynote speaker at GDC. Speaking predominately in Japanese, Miyamoto put the entire
conference in perspective – discussing the art of game design and how it must relate
to the science of programming a computer. While giving us a glimpse at his next game
TalentMaker (think of the PlayStation Spice Girls game done right), Miyamoto
addressed all the pitfalls of game development from slipped release dates to buggy
software. And what was the morale of the story? That a game designer must understand both
the technical and artistic elements of design – If you don’t know the
limitations of the hardware, how can you design a game to best fit within those
limitations? In the day and age of brash game designers who think they are the greatest
thing since sliced bread after one hit game, Miyamoto remains remarkably humble after two
decades of success designing products such as Mario, Zelda, and StarFox. It was a fitting
end to GDC.
And that's The Gist Of It. Pretty positive this week, wasn't it?
Oh, and don't forget to stay tuned early Thursday morning
to GameSlice as my latest GameSpot Behind the Games feature arrives detailing the behind
the scenes story of how LucasArts is creating games based on Star Wars: Episode I.
Your Ideas?
Do you have a suggestion about something that should be added to next week's list?
Is there a game that gist doesn't cut it or one that does it gist
right? E-mail gistlist@gameslice.com
and we'll consider your suggestion.
Thanks for reading!
Geoff
Keighley
Editor-in-Chief
GameSlice
