GDC Day 1 Blitz

A tale of our epic journey to the Game Developer’s Conference, and the trevails we suffered along the way

4:30am and the Wandering Goblin staffers drag their lazy butts out of bed. Damn, the sun isn’t even insane enough to be up this early and it’s fracking cold outside….for LA that is….which is about 60 degrees. Thank the whiskey gods we all took our mud bath’s last night, so, we only have to worry about being slightly ripe…nothing a little deodorant can’t handle. Did I mention the sun wasn’t even up yet? We’re on the road by 5am and successfully heading to the Game Developer’s Conference 2008 in San Francisco.

It’s approximately 6 hours from Los Angeles where Goblin HQ is located, but we just equipped the Goblin Wagon with a hemi and it only takes us 5 hours. We actually take a bit longer, since we stop for lunch at the famous Pea Soup Andersen’s where of course we have to show off our maturity. When we’re not gaming, we’re finding other, more interesting ways of entertaining ourselves and our 3 fans.

It really hits us at after a few hours on the road: we must really, really love to play games. Who else would get up that early to make the trek to attend the Game Developer’s Conference? Of course, we do it for you, our fans….all three of you. We really do because none of us would normally drag our asses out of bed at that freaking awful hour of the morning. That, and we were excited as hell to be going to one of the biggest gaming events that starts off the season of gaming events.

I’m rambling. It’s the exhaustion. Despite the fatigue, I am cognizant that central California is really quite lovely. Here’s some pics of the 575 miles that separate the Goblins from the GDC.

Ooh look, a truck. It’s only 1 of a billion that we’ve seen today.

Is that a town? I can’t tell.

Yay! A pic of a Volkswagon for our one fan in Germany.

11:00 am and we roll into San Francisco. It smells so bad, but it feels so good! We check into the hotel at 11:35 am. Being that we are still struggling writers, we have to find less than 5-star places to live for the next two nights. Travelodge is our choice of hotels for this trip. This turns out to be the biggest mistake of the entire journey.

To our surprise we find that this Travelodge is by far the worst we’ve ever been in. It’s baaaaaad. The Travelodge in The Hills Have Eyes was nicer. When we walk into the new, temporary home of the Goblin HQ we are personally introduced by name to 7 of biggest roaches in the city of San Francisco. Pig screams like a girl, I jump on furniture and EvilKristof is nowhere to be found. Damn….this sucks.

We drop off any gear that we don’t need and hoof it to the GDC convention with smiles on our faces. At the time, we were still pretty jazzed about the hotel, even though it was, shall we say, unkempt. We were told by Travelodge that the Moscone Convention Center was 0.6 miles from the hotel. That’s a score, because it’s walking distance. You can’t get closer than that for a mere $50 a night! We trudged up the street, and three miles later we get to the Game Developer’s Conference. No lie (it was frakkin’ far) and our smiles are gone. We shrug it off of course; the good Goblin staffers are a resilient bunch, and we get down to work.

After practically wrestling a GDC security guard (who didn’t want to let us into the press room to pick up our badges) because we didn’t have press badges, I have to resort to good old fashioned Goblin trickery. I chose a widely-used Goblin battle tactic…confusion. I said, “Security Guard, how am I supposed to get into the press room to get my press badge if I don’t have a press badge to get in?”. Now, for a normal oponent, it would take at least 30 minutes of this line of questioning before they relented, but our GDC security guard on had a 6^th grade education and gave up after only the first question.

The GDC had a ton of press peeps sign up and only so many badges to give away. So, certain small websites (like ours with our 3 fans) only received one complimentary press badge and were told that we’d have to purchase the other two at $2K a piece.

Uh…what? We’re starving writers dammit, we can barely afford the shirts we’re wearing (which were free swag shirts at the last con we covered)!

That’s where our new best friend Dallas came through for us. I call her ‘Dallas The Awesome‘, because she simply saved the day. She made some magic and POOF! Our press passes appeared.

With our giddy little hearts afloat we decide to scope the joint. You know, check out who’s who and what’s what, and snag some MMO news. Doing that brought us to the awesomest game devs in the galaxy. CCP. We love CCP and here’s why….EVE. Nuff said. If you haven’t played it, you should, unless you’re ten, then we don’t want you to. I said WE, as in the royal we, not EVE, they probably do want you. (Whoops, that was another run-on, ranty sentence inspired by extraordinary fatigue, wasn’t it?)

Pig singing sweetly to Dr. Gudmundsson about his journey through EVE.

Pig scored an awesome interview and we got a ton of information about EVE. We also received probably the most awesome press kit I’ve seen in my years as a journalist and it all fits on this:

Damn!!! This flash drive has a full metal jacket and is sweeeeeeeeeeet!

So now it’s 8:45 pm; you probably have some idea we Goblins go through to get you the highs and lows of the GDC. Two bags of back-breaking swag, one hole in someones left sneaker, three hands full of mysterious foreign germs, two spilled Cokes (we shed tears over this for at least five minutes), one broken camera tripod, one smashed ear bud, seven missed phone calls, and one very angry executive editor who keeps asking us in not-so-nice words why we haven’t posted any GDC news stories yet.

I’d like to claim that with a full nights sleep, tomorrow will be a much better and more productive day. Sadly, it was not to be. See, some crazy prostitute/junkie kept waking us up by yelling and screaming in the parking lot at her boyfriend, who conincidentally happens to be the night manager of Travelodge. He’s also married, we find out later. They have a full-on domestic dispute, and the police are called no less than 3 times. The manager, as you might imagine, is a less-than-stellar individual and let’s leave it at that. Goblins generally don’t like crazy, prostitute-dating, night managers and have nothing nice to say about them.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. More tomorrow as we have some interviews lined up with Sony Online Entertainment and Flagship Studios. We were also invited to party with the EVE devs and crew at the CCP/White Wolf party celbrating their union. Woot!

Cya later and don’t be a hater!