GDC Diary Day 1

Bleary eyed, I stepped out of San Francisco airport the day before the Game Developers Conference 09 kicked off and was given my first taste of America. After a mere moment I was quickly bundled into a yellow taxi and I felt like I'd entered into the land of television. My first sighting of a cop car on route to our apartment led to squeaks of glee followed by disappointment when it didn't explode and flip over aka every cop car chase I'd seen on my television screen.

Arriving at the apartment where the entire Cletus Clay team was staying (student style) I finally met Anthony. Severely jet lagged I dread to think what his initial impression of me was. Having been working with him for over a year, to groggily grunt a hello was not exactly the first impression I had intended. Still, it was a very exciting moment and it was fantastic to put a human face and character to an online friend and colleague.

With introductions out of the way it was time to ingest some beers and enjoy some grub at the indie developer gathering. That evening was a bit of a blur for me. I do remember staggering up to a lot of people whom I really admired and pulling strange facial expressions and garbling my sentences whilst trying to explain that it was really cool to be in their presence and I hoped to see them around during GDC. I accidentally ate half a chilli thinking it was a pepper and the fire in my mouth gave me the energy to start chatting with David Hellman who was sat next to me. I loved his artwork in Braid and have been following his blog for a little while now so was a little in awe of him but after a brief chat about the differences in the UK and the USA I realised that he was a great guy and that sometimes meeting your hero is a good thing .

Sadly I was too tired to brave the indie pub crawl that occurred after the meal and headed back with Alex for some much needed sleep. Anthony, Andy and Michaela however were dirty stop outs and crawled into the apartment sometime in the early hours. This led to a bit of a slow start to day 2.