Nor did you get to drive it in the demo - it's the scripted composition that makes it interesting. It works brilliantly as a demo, but I suspect the novelty of driving the morphing squigglemobile in the demoverse would wear off pretty fast.

And once you do start incorporating other elements like AI, level geometry, physics, etc to make things interesting, you'll no longer have the luxury of allocating all your computational resources for graphical eyecandy.

Well, it is harder in a game to indicate to the player when they should press the Rhinoceros button - sure, running man to WWI fighter plane is fairly intuitive, and the squiggly-line-to-polygon-to-point-cloud powerup basically speaks for itself, but finding some fairly obvious method of indicating this is the point in the game story/world where the rhino is called for can be more of a challenge.

Navis of ASD who wrote the winning demo is ex-games industry: http://www.hugi.scene.org/online/hugi34/hugi%2034%20-%20demo...

Smash of Fairlight who wrote the 2nd placed demo is in the games industry (at Sony Europe IIRC): http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/about/