1999 Game Developers Conference (GDC) Recordings Archive | Hacker News Reader

1999 Game Developers Conference (GDC) Recordings Archive

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124 pointsthunderbong30 comments

We bought GDC all access passes this year and I am sickened to learn it no longer includes access to the GDC vault. Also super annoying that I get spam marketing emails constantly now, because informatech sold my personal information.

Honestly disgusting exploitation of knowledge.

GDC needs real competition.

>I get spam marketing emails

Welcome to just about any industry event.

They're mostly legit enough to have unsubscribe links so either do some email cleanup from time to time or learn to just ignore them.

I swear some unsubscribe forms exist to play by the rules but don't actually do anything. I've gotten spam emails from "enterprise db" about webinars I'm not interested in for I don't know how long now. They've got one of those generic unsubscribe links[1] that doesn't have a URL built for your email and makes you type the email yourself, so I have to check which of my several addresses they're sending emails to (my org gives a few emails that forward to the same place). But even after doing that like a dozen times with different email addresses they continue to email me. I mark them as spam now and blocked the address.

[1] https://info.enterprisedb.com/manage-email-preferences.html?...

I suspect that some organizations have broken unsubscribe systems or you just end up getting repopulated from one of the thousand email lists you're on. If it's not a one or two click unsubscribe (e.g. doesn't require manually entering email), I'm pretty close to reporting SPAM and blocking at that point.

What's stopping you? I've worked on the technical side of implementing opt-outs in email newsletters. If you screw it up, you get spam complaints. That's the incentive to do it right.

Speaking about GDC, if you're into game development or just curious, this talk is legendary and inspirational to aspiring game devs (and very intertaining to boot):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

"In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994."

Maybe someone here can help me. There was a GDC presentation in the late nineties or maybe 2000 or so. The speaker was from EA maybe, having worked a lord of the rings game maybe?

His whole pitch, which came with movies, was if someone did Mario in the style of lord of the rings. There was a scene where luigi dies and Mario weeps. Bowser makes a great speech before his assembled armies which finishes with “and KILL THE PRINCESS!”

Can’t remember who or when. Did I just hallucinate the whole thing? Anyone got a link?

That sounds amazing and I'm just commenting so I can check in later, hopefully someone is able to fulfil your request.

if you click the timestamp on a comment to go to its permalink, you can then favorite the comment for later.

GDC has a YouTube channel. I’m not sure how far it goes back but they put a lot of good videos on there.

https://www.youtube.com/@Gdconf/videos

They tend to post them a few years after the fact and don’t always have the date. ..

Sounds like Ernest Adams, but I can't find the talk from a quick search.

It wasn't Ernest, I'd remember that, but thanks for suggestion!

This is so much better than what GDC is today. All these talks are practical talks that will teach you how to do things. Even though they are 24 years old, many of them are still relevant. GDC today is all about advocacy, business talks and developers behind big name titles sharing platitudes. My first GDC was in 2000, and I go every year, but in the last few years i don't bother with any of the talks, and just hang out with friends.

There are still lots of good tech and design talks, it’s just that as you get older and more experienced, your standards for what is interesting and worth your time get more strict.

I agree. I've been going since 2010 and it's much harder to hear something new -- and I don't feel it's conference quality. The biggest challenge for an attendee is the roll of the dice if the talk you go to will be quality. This year, anything with the word "AI" in it was basically garbage talks with companies posturing and hand waving about how they will use LLMs/etc.

My expectation when I go to GDC is that if I leave with three insights I wouldn't otherwise have had, it was worth the cost.

I really wish that was true.

The talks were good because we needed them. Just imagine what it was like in the '90s. There were almost no books written about game development and only one or two were any good. Everybody had Understanding Comics and maybe sometime Design of Everday Things because they were useful. In 1995 I read a bunch of post mortems and design docs from Activision and Infocom to learn what to do. And being more experienced I would realize even that was a little silly. The head of QA says we didn't test enough, the programmer (they didn't really always have leads) would say we need to re-engineer.. etc.

Now there are lots of good books, classes. Enjoy!

This is great! I got through an hour or so of talks... freaking loved it!

Best part, I think, is hearing teaser references to games that came out 20 years ago. Games I knew and loved.

Anyway, I'll be listening to the rest of this while I do a road trip this week.

Thanks!

Really wish these had video

I've found something here, but the videos don't seem to work on a quick look: https://www.gdcvault.com/browse/gdc-99/

Any convenient way to get this as an RSS to hand to a podcast app?

The archive directory listing is in xml, you could whip something up in Yahoo! Pipes.

cannot tell if </s> or .....

Your podcast app doesn't support importing a folder as a podcast?

I can't think of any podcast app that supports that. They are meant to consume, present and harvest online feeds as their source.

Podcast addict will certainly import a directory.

Yeah I was going to bring up Podcast Addict as well. Dunno why you'd use anything else.

Nice, thank you! For me there are several no-gos, such as advertisements and it not being FOSS but for the majority of people it looks like the perfect choice.

Oh I paid for the premium version years ago. Well worth it.

Oh this is good to know about

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