I spent all of last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This was the fourth year I’ve attended, and while the quality of the presentations continues to vary, I met a lot of cool people this year and had a chance to talk to some otherwise inaccessible folk. I finally met Tokyopia’s famous GMan, I chatted briefly with Akira Yamaoka (more in a later post), and Tuesday night I ended up at a party in Toru Iwatani’s hotel room (he’s produced over 50 games, but you might have heard of this one).

Some of the sessions this year were interesting as well. Keita Takahashi’s talk on Katamari Damacy was pretty interesting, and really enjoyed a talk about the realtime movies in Resident Evil 4 (more on that later). There were some neat technical sessions as well, which apply to my day job as a games programmer.

Between the people and the sessions I attended, GDC 2005 was a lot of fun. I’ll post more info on some of the horror-related things I learned shortly.