Gamasutra prepares for unprecedented 16th year of live GDC coverage

The weather's finally starting to warm up, everyone on your Twitter feed is suddenly talking about San Francisco, and game development tool makers are bombarding our inboxes with product announcements. All this can only mean one thing: the Game Developers Conference is about to begin! As always, Gamasutra will be coming to you live from the show with up-to-the-minute news, panel coverage, interviews and more. This is our sixteenth straight year covering GDC (or CGDC, for you old-timers), meaning we've got the longest track record in the business -- if we're counting magazines, that's second only to Game Developer -- our sister publication! GDC is by far our busiest time of the year, and 2012's show will offer our deepest coverage yet. We've got no less than ten journalists on the scene this year, reporting back from discussion panels, keynotes and award ceremonies as they happen, interviewing developers and industry notables from all corners of the video game business, and for the first time, co-hosting a daily podcast with the fine folks at video game radio show One Life Left. The show hasn't even started yet and we've already got an enormous amount of coverage, including our popular Road to the IGF series of interviews with finalists from the popular Independent Games Festival. As for the show itself, our editors are looking forward to reporting on quite a few talks from some notable industry personalities. Highlights include a Valve discussion on the making of Portal 2, a design talk on Volition's Saints Row: The Third, and a Fireside Chat with Markus 'Notch' Persson. We'll also be attending talks on the business of launching SWTOR, the making of Nintendo's Super Mario 3D Land, as well as four classic postmortems about beloved games Gauntlet, Fallout, Alone in the Dark and Harvest Moon. GDC 2012 will take place March 5 through March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and is owned and operated by Gamasutra parent company UBM TechWeb.