Gamasutra
April 24, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 17
Past Scores
RetailVison: Retain Pain Centralized
[04.24.98]
Selling stuff on the Net: Take 2 - Auction Time
[04.10.98]
Nintendo Stands Alone
[03.13.98]
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But while the consumer shows were always big booths and big bashes, CGDC was something else entirely. The advent of real booths and a tradeshow floor is relatively new. Partially it's because there's a real tradeshow group running it now, and they actually make money on such things, but mostly it's because of a shift in the way games are made and the influx of special hardware that desperately needs games to make people actually buy the damn stuff. Even more fun is the Head-Hunter barometer.
Back in the original days when CGDC was started, games were one man efforts, with ex-Atari types like my friend Rob Fulop, who designed the graphics, game-play and coded Demon Attack, which went on to sell 2.6 million copies. Hard to sell someone like that a half million bucks worth of Alias Wavefront and the latest SGI lust box to go with it. The conference was about bunch of guys and a few girls who wanted to talk to other people who were ridiculous enough to do the same thing for a living. Basically, a SIG for Worldcon. Try and sell these guys development tools? Tools?!?! Ha! When we got started, we had to program on big granite slabs, and we only go to use 0's! (OK… I stole that one from Dilbert…)
Now it's impossible to design a game that doesn't require at least 3 full-time 3D artists who would be just soooo much more productive with this high end Unix box, a support cast of thousands, and a group of engineers that understand just what the hell Microsoft did to us with the latest rev of D3D. The 3D hardware card companies are doing everything they can to help the game guys make great games, just because they love and believe in us so much. Nothing to do with the fact that Word is running pretty much flat-out, despite Microsoft's perpetual attempts to bloat. (Ohh… to MS shots in one paragraph… one more and I get a hat-trick.) They still really need us to make people lust after a new video card every year.
But that's all reletively new to CGDC. The first time people showed up for something other then a shmooze-fest, was the Suite Crawl. The first time I went though this night, I was amazed. The hors d'oeuvre and chatcha quality was awesome. These were all my favorite game companies, but just 4-5 people in each suite, and they were just their looking for good people to join their company. I think the best goodie that year was everybody getting a leather soccer ball.
Four years ago, it went insane. Now there was a little room full of either the companies recruiting or headhunters. Walking through that group was like trying to pass through the airport unmolested. The year after that, one company was actually giving away a hardware phone switch in exchange for your resume. This was one of those boxes that could tell if an incoming call was modem, fax or voice. It was wicked cool, though what it had to do with the company that was using it as bribeware I still haven't figured out. That was the year that Rob came up with the idea of the sandwich-board. He wanted to get a 900 number, and walk around the conference wearing a sign that said, "Experienced Designer, Call for Resume." He figured he could make his yearly wage just on the 900 charges alone. Those were both killer years in the industry, and CGDC was a hiring-fest.
Then in 1996 the industry started the big tank. Smaller software companies were going down left and right, and it was relatively easy to pick up an entire team, much less one or two programmers. The head-hunters were still there, but they weren't giving away such great stuff, and the companies had tables that looked more like a high-school bake-sale than a full recruiting station. (Disney's Siggraph booth is still the most impressive recruiting station ever. An entire, full sized and full budgeted tradeshow booth who's sole purpose in life is to recruit the best talent the Mouse can get it's paws on.)
Here it is, 1998, and there are 30,000 open requisitions in the Valley, so by all means, this should have been a recruiting-fest. But it wasn't. There were about 40 booths of head-hunters and companies that were trying to avoid paying the head hunters their extra 1/3 year fee by recruiting directly. But it felt like professionals doing their jobs. There was no sense of panic, no fear that if they didn't grab the right body, their project would fail and they'd miss x-mas. If I'm reading the mood correctly, I think the CGDC Groundhog came up and saw it's shadow. Another year of consolidations and strange days in the game biz. Damn.
-B
Unemployed with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica [calica@viewpoint.com] has been making a living in the computer and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that another time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets...
He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you.