The inaugural Game Developers Conference Canada wrapped up today at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Part of Vancouver Digital Week, the two-day GDC Canada spawned from the Vancouver International Game Summit, ran with enthusiasm but middling success by Victoria’s Greg Spievak and his Reboot Communications for three years.

GDC events, produced by San Francisco’s Think Services, are held annually in Austin, Texas; China; and Europe, with the flagship GDC held in San Francisco each spring.

Think Services brought the GDC brand to Vancouver by partnering with Reboot. I spoke with Kathy Schoback, executive vice president of global events for Think Services, at the media centre, and she told me that she had just booked space for next year’s GDC Canada.

The video-game development community in Vancouver, she explained, had been wanting VIGS to be more of a GDC-style event, and Think Services had been considering Vancouver as a conference site. Morphing VIGS into GDC Canada was a simple solution which benefitted all parties.

Schoback admitted that there was concern that attendance at GDC Canada would be low because of Vancouver’s proximity to San Francisco and the fact that the events were a scant two months apart. Developers from Eastern Canada who had sent staff to San Francisco, she said, were reluctant to send more people across the continent.

“I think that’s a first year out problem,” said Schoback, who is encouraging developers next year to send some people to San Francisco and some to Vancouver. But, she said, GDC Canada is intended to be by Canadians for Canadians, so the themes and topics of the two conferences will be different.

The original theme for this first GDC Canada was “big budget, big team, multiple SKU, international deployment,” said Schoback. “That made sense year ago.” Nobody expected the contraction the industry has faced in the past six months.

That’s why conference organizers decided to make free passes available to unemployed game developers. It was a wise decision, because while GDC Canada could have been an “exec-fest”, according to one attendee. Instead the rooms and corridors were filled with T-shirt and sneaker-wearing developers, and circulating among the crowd at the convention centre, I picked up the same creative energy that I’ve sensed at the popular and busy San Francisco conferences.

While exact numbers weren’t available at the time, conference director Izora de Lillard said that attendance was higher than expected, and that everyone from speakers to vendors to advisory board members were excited about the success of the inaugural GDC Canada.

GDC Canada 2009 kicked off with an onstage interview with Don Mattrick conducted by Electric Playground founder and co-host Victor Lucas. Mattrick, the founder of Distinctive Software and one of the instigators of game development in Canada, once led Electronic Arts, the video-game publishing giant, and is now a senior vice president at Microsoft in charge of its Xbox business.

The affable Mattrick was a good choice to lead off the show. A native Vancouverite, Mattrick has always been an advocate and cheerleader for the industry in this city, and led the cheers when Lucas offered that “Canadian game developers kick ass”.

After a short video bio of Mattrick, the two got into conversation and started by running down the laundry list of rumours that have been floating around about what Microsoft might be showing off at E3 next month.

Motion controls for the Xbox 360? “No comment,” joked Mattrick.

Metal Gear Solid 4 coming to the Xbox? “No comment.”

Next generation console, Xbox 720, being debuted? “No comment.”

Then they talked about topics ranging from the history of game development in Vancouver to shifting models of development and publishing to Mattrick’s belief in the importance of people above all else.

Leading off the second day at GDC Canada was a keynote presentation by Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the duo who founded and lead Edmonton’s BioWare, now a division of EA. The two medical doctors, who started their company while still attending the University of Alberta, talked about the importance of narrative in video games, using examples from their successful games Baldur’s Gate, Jade Empire, and the forthcoming Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.

Other GDC Canada sessions included lectures about creating game characters, designing games to elicit emotions in players and taking advantage of digital distribution channels, to panels discussing how companies can best adjust to uncertainty, best practices for audio production, and working with outsourcing vendors.

For a first-time event – because even though GDC Canada came out of the VIGS this was the first time the sessions were organized and programmed by a company with expertise in game conference production – GDC Canada was a good start.

What will be more telling, though, is how much next year’s GDC Canada grows and improves. Vancouver, as an important hub for the video game industry, deserves to have an event like this. It’s not a trade show, but an opportunity for smart, passionate people to talk about how they create and craft interactive experiences.

GDC events, Schoback told me, are about “learning, networking, and inspiration”. That was certainly true of the first GDC Canada, and I hope that it will be true for future GDC Canadas as well.

[Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight’s tech blog. ]

I spent four straight days inside the new Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre (VCEC), leaving only to caffeinate and head home for the night.

Sunday, I was at EPIC. Monday was Fjord’s Convergence 09. Tuesday and Wednesday were the inaugural GDC Canada and the International Partnering Forum.

The VCEC is a beautiful, breathtaking facility. I love the wood work, the vaulted spaces, and the massive windows that create such an atmosphere, even in the rain and fog. But it gets a massive fail for not providing free WiFi access.

Instead, wireless access – which is provided by Bell – costs $15 per day. Conference organizers can arrange to get passwords for their attendees, for a conference-sized fee.

I find this ridiculous and frustrating. We’re living in an era when free WiFi has become the norm for most public facilities. Even the airports are providing wireless Internet access for free.

The weekday events I attended were all part of Vancouver Digital Week. I’ve been at many press events and conferences for the video game and technology industries, and the common denominator? Free wireless.

I don’t know if the VCEC mandated the WiFi fee, or if it’s Bell deciding to make some money. Maybe the exorbitant charge is an oversight because nobody thought about the optics of wireless access in the facility.

But charging visitors and conference attendees for wireless isn’t going to generate much by way of revenues. It’s certainly not going to recover the cost of constructing the facility.

So the only solution is for whichever organization is responsible, whether VCEC or Bell, to drop the cash grab and make WiFi a free service for visitors.

[Cross posted at the Georgia Straight’s tech blog. ]

Entertainment magazine Empire has Steven Spielberg as guest editor of its 20th anniversary edition, and the online home of the mag boasts “extended coverage” which includes a video of a Goonies reunion.

That’s right, Evil Bat. A Goonies reunion. In video form.

All seven principle cast members, producer Steven Spielberg, and director Richard Donner were there. That’s them, pictured above, some 20 years after the film was released.

You know you want to watch it. Off you go.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it intends to acquire Vancouver video game developer BigPark.

BigPark was created by game veterans Erik Kiss (chief technology officer), Hanno Lemke (CEO), and Wil Mozell (studio president) in 2007. The trio had previously worked together at Electronic Arts. Kiss and Lemke go back as far as Distinctive Software, which was founded in 1982 by Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember and was arguably the first game developer in Canada. (For more, read “Vancouver’s video game family tree” [http://www.straight.com/article-198534/video-game-family-tree].)

Mattrick, who ran EA for a number of years, is now a senior vice president at Microsoft in charge of the interactive entertainment business. Before he took that job, he agreed to be BigPark’s chairman.

When I interviewed Don Mattrick in early August last year, he confessed to being quite excited about BigPark. “Hanno, Wil, and Erik running an organization of under a thousand people is like bringing a gun to a rock fight,” he told me over coffee. “I was flattered that they’d come to me and ask me to be involved. I said, ‘Look, I don’t know if I want to be the day-to-day operating leader for a small business, but if I was ever going to pick a business to be engaged with it would be you guys and if you’ll have me as chairman and recognize that I’m also going to do something else, that would be great.’”

In a phone interview with Lemke this afternoon, he explained that BigPark has only been working with Microsoft for about the past year, and that his group have been working with Phil Spencer, Microsoft Game Studios general manager. In a release, Spencer said that he looked forward to showcasing BigPark’s first product at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles this June. It is a game for the Xbox 360 that has Xbox Live/online components.

The deal with Microsoft, said Lemke, gives BigPark access to distribution, technology, and capital that will better enable the boutique developer to do its thing.

In an interview last October, Lemke talked about what it was like to run Black Box for EA, and how it was important to keep the independent studio vibe despite the fact that it was part of a 1,200-employee company. Lemke, who found himself intrigued by the way the online business was exploding, left EA to consider what opportunities there might be in that space, and in particular products that could affect how consumers interact with each other and interact with devices. “It fascinated me,” he said in a boardroom at BigPark’s offices at UBC.

“What I see is the opportunity for us is melding a more accessible, fun, social experience into something that people interact with…. There are pockets of markets that are underserved and people who want an accessible experiences that has depth to it and is well crafted with high production values and really immerses you in the experience. That’s where we think we’ve got a lot to offer.”

Today, Lemke said that the BigPark game that will be announced next month is not a title that was part of the developers first efforts, but came out of an opportunity that came up last year. It does, however, belong on the same field as the other products that BigPark is working on.

Most important, though, is that Lemke said the title he and BigPark will be showing off in L.A. is something we’ve never seen before.

I can hardly wait.

[Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight’s tech blog. ]

It’s no surprise to a guy like me, who’s spent most of his professional life working with writers of one sort or another, but most video game developers just don’t appreciate what a writer can do for them.

Marianne Krawczyk and Susan O’Connor are here to help. Or they will be, when they give a talk at the inaugural GDC Canada, which runs May 12 and May 13 here in Vancouver.

I interviewed the two writers for this week’s “Trigger Happy” column, which publishes in the Georgia Straight.

Susan O’Connor thinks we may be close to entering a golden age of storytelling in video games. But for that to happen, the freelance game writer told the Georgia Straight, game developers need to call her sooner rather than later.