GDC Celebrates 25th Conference With Official History Outreach

Author: by Staff

The organizers of the 2011 Game Developers Conference are announcing a call for written memories, photos and videos from the past twenty-four iterations of the Game Developers Conference. The public call comes as the event approaches 'GDC 25' in February 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and organizers plan an unprecedented digitization push from its own archives, utilizing an official GDC historian. With almost a quarter-century at the forefront of the art and business of game creation, the first ever GDC (at that time the Computer Game Developers Conference) took place all the way back in 1988. There were two events in the show's inaugural year, and a yearly conference going forward, growing to over 18,000 attendees and encompassing events like the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival. Along the way, GDC has seen keynotes and signature lectures from Shigeru Miyamoto, event founder Chris Crawford, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, design legends like Sid Meier, futurist Ray Kurzweil, and a host of others - and inspired tens of thousands of game creators to take their skills and inspiration to the next level. To celebrate 'GDC 25', the conference organizers have appointed an official historian for the show in the form of noted technology archivist Jason Scott, known for his Textfiles.com digital archive and his history of preserving important digital artifacts. Scott, who has created the BBS Documentary and the just-debuted interactive fiction documentary Get Lamp, will be in charge of receiving and synthesizing historical accounts, anecdotes and other media from GDC attendees, and digitizing extensive printed, audio and video archives. He will be posting a twice-weekly blog post on the official GDC website news page [RSS feed] and sister outlets starting in early November, revealing exclusive videos and audio lectures, stored on the UBM TechWeb Game Network's GDC Vault website, alongside other images and analysis from the history of the event. Alongside this announcement, GDC organizers - part of the Game Network, as is this website - and Scott are calling for submissions from people who've attended the show over the past 25 versions. They've set up an official email address, gdc25@gdconf.com, which CGDC and GDC attendees can email with anecdotes and reminiscences of attending previous GDC shows. In addition, if previous attendees have content from classic shows they'd like to share, please tag photos as 'gdc25' on Flickr or upload videos to Vimeo or YouTube, and email the official 'gdc25' mail address.