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E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

Just came back from Microsoft’s Gears of War 2 event in downtown Los Angeles. Apart from seeing and playing the game, some of us were able to walk out with a pretty slick art book that promises to give you an inside look at the game. I took a couple quick snaps as soon as I got home…

I’m in South Beach, Miami, today. I arrived late last evening to a surprisingly mild evening — for some reason I expected it to be warmer even though I should know better.

The Winter Music Conference is in town, as evidenced by many of the clubs mentioning the WMC in their marquee and by the folks I see walking around — I think. However, I’m here for work. The event I’m flew out to staff is one of the few official WMC events on Tuesday to kick off the conference. Ben, one of my colleagues has put together quite the event: Paul Oakenfold is playing with members of the Florida Classical Symphony and a three-piece band, featuring the soundtrack he did for our game, The Bourne Conspiarcy, while Cee Lo makes an appearance as a special guest. The entire thing is being streamed live on Yahoo! and you can get there from the Bourne Sessions web site.

If you happen to live in Florida, or near it, and want a guaranteed entrance to the show, enter Joystiq’s Joyswag giveaway for a chance to get in — note that entries close at 12:00 PM ET.

The first day ended up being far busier than I thought, so a proper recap will have to come later. The first day ended up being far better than I expected and the closing panel, “Who Owns Word of Mouth? (And Who Should?)” was far and away the best.

I’ll go into detail later — this one requires me to noodle it a bit more so I can really explain why it ended up being the most useful of the day for me. At the post-conference cocktail/networking social thing I got interviewed on camera on my thoughts on the first day. There is no doubt that footage is probably the most embarrassing thing ever and if they end up using any of it, my television career is over. Hopefully day two will be as useful and thought provoking.

I’ll be heading over to Las Vegas next week to attend the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2007, my first such conference. I haven’t been to an industry conference in a long time, but this one should be a good one to come back to not just because Jeff Bell is the opening keynote. I hope to run into John Porcaro from Gamerscore Blog there and have some time to catch up on the state of our industry, among other things. Rick Murray, one of my former colleagues (and former head of my group) at Edelman will be there as well speaking during the “Who Owns Word of Mouth? (And Who Should?)” panel.

Hopefully I’ll learn a few new things and the $50 I’m setting aside for gambling lasts the couple days I’m in town.

Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

Wow, I’m a little late with writing about GDC 2007, don’t you think? Either way, here goes one of the better highlights from that week…

I didn’t get much time to walk around the Game Developers Conference expo halls on my last day in San Francisco before my flight took off that evening. However I did check out the games exhibited as part of the Independent Games Festival in the North Hall.

There were a few familiar sights, like Band of Bugs and Castle Crashers — both titles that are due out on Xbox Live Arcade in the future — and there were a bunch that I’ve never heard of, mostly because they were small indie studios or student entries. In the very last aisle of the booth space something caught my eye and I just had to try it even though I, quite certifiably, suck at rhythm or music games. Yes, it was Opera Slinger a one level game created by ten students at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. Even though I probably looked like the most shameful nerd sitting in front of the computer trying to sing while stay quiet enough to not draw attention, I got completely wrapped up in the game and I ended up talking about it to anybody who would listen for the full week afterwards. Those folks probably don’t like me anymore.

Still, go check it out. It’s only one level but it’s got a bunch of songs. They’re all classical music with rock opera lyrics all based on the game’s narrative and you’re judged on your ability to hit the right general notes for each song. Kind of like Karaoke Revolution meets rock opera with a plot… or something. Sure the core gameplay isn’t terribly original, but it’s wrapped up pretty nicely, has a good tongue in cheek feel to it and it’s even a free download!