There were more than a quarter-million people there this year. That's a whole bunch of people!
Videogame trade shows, then. You know all those attendees who complain about the queues and the workload and the unsatisfactory amuse-bouches that end up constituting most of your daily diet and the running around and the reticent Japanese developers and the overenthusiastic American developers and the dictaphone failures and lack of sleep? All of those people are completely correct. But it’s still a lot of fun.
If you know me, you’ll know I love Germany about 300 times more than I love my own country, so Koeln and Leipzig have always been a pleasure. Gamescom 2010 was my fourth, and apart from the Tokyo Game Show it’s the only trade show I’ve covered. I’m too young for the “glory days” of E3, when the publishers’ stands were loud enough to be borderline illegal and they served champagne in glasses wedged twixt a booth babe’s cleavage and gave you cigars made of money. Gamescom may be the largest game show on Earth, but it’s not given to American excesses. It’s large, but there’s decorum.
There was way too much going on over Gamescom week to post stuff up at the time, but here’s what I did: on Monday, I covered the Game Developer’s Conference Europe for EDGE Online, and watched many passionate and intelligent men tell me about the pain and effort that goes into the games that we tear apart. David Cage made a rather convincing case for running Quantic Dream as an “enlightened dictatorship” with his face pasted all over it. The brilliant and hilarious creative director of Red Steel 2, Jason VandenBerghe, talked about how motion control has and hasn’t changed the world, and spent ten minutes doing spirited impressions of different types of Red Steel 2 player with a walking cane. Then Google’s Mark DeLoura announced precisely nothing, but was goaded by gamesindustry.biz’s deputy editor Alec Meer into admitted that the MIGHT be announcing something soon. Journalism, ho!
Tuesday saw me and every other games journalist in Europe annexed by Microsoft for their Play Day, where I played with a pretend tiger (well, cheetah). Then there were the press conferences, which I had to liveblog for VG247 with my netbook balanced on one raised knee because Sony DIDN’T PROVIDE SEATING, which I think might just be unparalleled for a major press conference. EA’s was far better. It had seats.
And then began the true madness. I’m still not through the write-up backlog. Highlights: I got all short of breath over Fallout New Vegas, I interviewed Ken Levine after seeing the now-infamous Bioshock: Infinite reveal demo, LittleBigPlanet 2 blew my tiny mind with its level-creation possibilities, Bethesda and Splash Damage’s Brink made me actually like a multiplayer shooter for the first time since Halo 1. I didn’t write about Rock Band 3 – I hope to do so a hell of a lot when it’s released, and it’s on the cover of this month’s EDGE – but it taught me how to play the main riff from Du Hast in about a minute and instantly proved its worth as a guitar-learning tool.
I wrote a somewhat hurried summary of the whole show for The Observer, shortly before I ran out of steam and fell onto a plane at 6AM in the morning on Friday. I just had my first good night’s sleep in two weeks. (Yes, it is 3.30PM. I woke up NOT LONG AGO.)
So yeah: that’s what I did at Gamescom. Roll on next year. Or, indeed, TGS, which is in a little over two weeks. *whimper*
