Special Report: Swag at the 2009 MIGS!

The 2009 Montreal International Game Summit that is!

Yes, on the 15th and 16th, while you guys normally report gaming news from your computer desks on your lazy asses, I went out and did some hard hitting, investigative reporting, just for HoC!

Now I would normally not mention the fact that I volunteered there, and instead let you guys think that I was a VIP, but it is relevant to certain things that happened.

First I wanted to wait till they posted some pictures of the event, but they haven't so far and I didn't want to wait forever, so the best that I could do was these links (they guy won't let people have the direct link):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/casualcapture/4116565158/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/casualcapture/4115793457/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/casualcapture/4116555752/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/casualcapture/4115781643/

The real meat of trip happened on the first day of the summit (15th). I think that I had the single best volunteer task as I was responsible for registering the speakers of the summit. This was nice for two reasons; first, I could personally meet all of the speakers and second, it wasn't very busy as there were only 50 people or so that came in. This is in contrast to the hundreds that had to register as attendees for the summit itself. So a couple times I was somewhat 'starstruck', as I got to meet people that worked on some of my favorite games. Although I couldn't really talk to most of them, as I didn't want to waste their time, I still found it enjoyable to meet them in person and I did manage to talk to a couple of them while they were waiting for a reporter to talk to them (the reporters and speakers were in the same room so that they could get interviews easily).

I met people from Valve, Ubisoft (including Patrick Plourde, the lead designer of Assassin's Creed 2, who I have seen in several videos), Bioware, A2M (the made the “Wet”), THQ, EA, etc.

The main speaker on this summit was Yoichi Wada, president and CEO of Square Enix. Sadly, I didn't get to meet him or see his speech, but I probably would have had a heart attack if I had to register this guy. It should be noted that he gave his talk in Japanese so you needed a translation headset, because he is that awesome (this fact will be important for later on in this post). Although I heard after that his speech was mostly just company propaganda and nothing special. Oh well.

I'll mention some speakers that I got to talk to personally. For example, I got to talk to Ken Rolston who was the lead designer for Morrowind and Oblivion. Here is a snippet of my interview with him:

Me: Hey, are you the designer that worked on Morrowind and Oblivion?
Rolston: Yeah, that's me.
Me: Wow. I am playing Oblivion right now actually.
Rolston: Why would you be doing that?
Me: Ummm.,,because it's fun?
Rolston: You should be playing Fallout 3
Me: Yeah, I already played that one...

I also go to talk to Jason Graves, a composer at the ironically named Jason Graves Music, Inc. He did the music for Dead Space, which won pretty much every best audio award for 2008, including outstanding audio of the year. I pretty much told this guy that the audio in the game was awesome.

There was also Marc LeBlanc, who was a core contributor to the System Shock and Thief series. I sadly missed the chance to tell him that System Shock 2 is pretty much my favorite game of all time.

Finally I should mention that the only speaker who I found intimidating was Jason Holtman from Valve. I had to ask him for his ID and when I told him that I had to keep it so that he could have a translation headset (for Mr. Wada's presentation was in Japanese), he was like “there's no way I am giving you my passport”. Then I suggested a driver's license but he said “no, forget it” and pretty much left. I felt like saying “Forgive me! I love Steam!”. He also had at least 7 press interviews, while most people only had 1-3, so he was probably stressed out.

I got the chance to see Randy van der Vlag (of the London, Ontario based Big Blue Bubble) and his presentation on “Big Worlds on Small Screens” where he talked about making a 'epic' fantasy game on the Nintendo DS. Most people think of the DS as a second rate system, but after seeing his talk I am sure that you would all agree that you can do some very impressive things with it. Here is a screenshot of the game that he worked on:

Oh and at one point he talked about designing a fire sprite for the game, but the concepts were all overly sexualized. He said that it didn't really fit the tone of the game so they ended up drastically changing the design of the character. See, it doesn't always have to be that way.

Oh and Aku will (or at least would) be happy to know that there were some “booth babes”, as they are called at E3, there. Or as I like to call them, “sponsor whores”. Man, I really wish I had a camera then.

Maybe I should have pretended not to understand or speak French at all so that I could hear what they were saying about me or other things.

Well how's that for original content?