San Francisco - GDC

After spending several days in the South Bay, I made my way up to San Francisco for the second week of my long trip to California.

San Francisco remains one of my favorite cities.  I used to work in the actual city, and love to take visitors to some of the fun locations scattered around "the city by the Bay".

My week began with a little surprise!  During the first night there, we had a series of earthquakes.

Many people get really "freaked out" during an earthquake.  Since I grew up in the Bay Area, I'm quite used to them.  I witnessed the big quake in 1989 that destroyed parts of the Bay Bridge and the Oakland freeway system.  This was a lot smaller, by comparison.  However, it ended up as two different quakes, separated by only a few seconds.  The second quake registered around 4.5 - enough to wake me up, which doesn't happen that often ; )

The area around my hotel was beautiful. I was only two blocks away from the Moscone Center, which is the big conventional center for SF.  On my way there, I passed these gorgeous scenes:

St. Patrick's Church

Yerba Buena Gardens, with the SF Museum of Modern Art in the background

One of the buildings at Yerba Buena Gardens is a concert hall.  It's been used by Apple for some of their press conferences.  This time, they were holding the event for the introduction of the iPad 3:

No surprise that anything Apple does these days, is covered by all the media.  The satellite news trucks were out in numbers for the press conference:

The main reason that I was in San Francisco this week, was for the 2012 Game Developers Conference (GDC):

This is one of the biggest events of the entire year, for the people that actually make games.  The attendance this year hit a record - over 23.000 people were there!  Everyone gathers to talk about methods and techniques for making games - programming, sound, story, game design, video effects...you name it.  They also have several sessions on the business side.

My company was there to show developers how much we support the developer ecosystem.  We had a booth on the main expo show floor.  I have to say that I'm pretty proud of the booth.  The entire thing was  my responsibility, and I think we achieved an amazing look that appealed to gamers. If you want to know how much money I spent on the show - you're going to have to ask ; )

How would you like to play a game with FIVE monitors.  Our graphics cards can do that... ; )

One of the most popular parts of the booth were our "driving machines".  We had a three-screen PC loaded with a driving game.  That was connected to a real racing seat, with a force-feedback system that made you feel like you were actually driving.  It had pedals, steering wheel and a gear shift:

One of the funnier moments was this young lady, driving the car.  She would squeal with delight as she raced around the track.  She held out her hands in front of her, to try and prevent the car from hitting a "wall".  She entertained the entire crowd ; )

Here's a short video from the day before the show opened, showing several crews racing to set-up their booth.  We were located right next to Intel, our biggest rival:

I think the strangest thing that happened was at the top of Macy's department store on Union Square.  We sat outside on a beautiful day, to enjoy lunch.  This giant seagull parked itself right behind us and watched us eat for over 30 minutes.  Thank goodness for the glass wall separating us...

That's it for now.  My adventure in San Francisco continues in the next post...when "guests" arrive in California ; )