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Hi Tappers, just a heads-up! As the east coast travelling correspondent, I’m going to be visiting the Too Many Games conference in Philadelphia tomorrow.

This isn’t really travel for me. I live in the area, so it’s really just a quick skip over to the Oaks Convention Center to visit the event. I’ve done this trip before and it’s a lot of fun. The focus is on vendors and there are some great concerts (last year, I saw an amazing set by Bit Brigade). But what I like to do the most at any event like this is check out all the local indie games! There’s a lot to say about the Philadelphia indie game scene lately, and I want to get a good cross section of it and tell some stories about our local work.

Too Many Games starts… today! at 2 PM. If you want to see me, look me up tomorrow. I’ll be wearing Portal swag.

MAGFest! This year was my second time going to the Music And Gaming Festival, held in National Harbor, Maryland near Washington DC. If you’re one who has never seen or heard of this festival, I highly recommend it. There’s great concerts, awesome cosplay, and of course… video games!

I was really impressed by the energy and enthusiasm I saw during the MAGFest Indie Videogame Showcase (Called MIVS, for short). The first thing I noticed: tons of games I hadn’t played before! The floor was full of independent developers: some who came from just up the street, others who came from faraway locations, all there to show off their stuff.  Here’s a quick roundup of a few of the things I got to play.

Havok, the Ireland-based physics middleware developer, has been hockey-pucked over to Microsoft by its former masters at Intel. While this news is unlikely to affect consumers much one way or another, it does mean that one of the leading developers of physics software for games is now technically in the hands of a first party publisher, though the companies have already announced that Havok technology will still be available for license by third party developers.

GDC was busy times, so sorry for the relative radio silence during the conference proper. If you are interested to know how my own talk at the Narrative Summit went, Polygon has a really nice writeup! Thank you to Colin Campbell and everyone else who was there, and I hope that you enjoyed it! From my experience, it seemed to go well and it was a lot of fun to be part of the summit.
In addition to my own speech, and meeting up with some great developers at GDC, I also attended a few panels when time permitted. Here, I’d like to talk about the GDC Microtalks, and the 1ReasonToBe panel.

Hi everyone! I’m just posting a quick notice to let you know that this year, I will not be writing up the GDC Narrative Summit. That’s because I’m actually speaking at the Narrative Summit, so I’m going to be kind of busy. Plus, that would be kind of weird and braggy, wouldn’t it? I think I just bragged anyway. Oops.

That isn’t the weirdest thing, though. What’s weird is that I’m onstage following Christy Marx. She wrote the Transmutate episode. Look, I’m having a moment here; you surely understand. Let’s just say I’m hoping GDC is truly, truly outrageous.

After the summits I’ll be at the regular expo until Friday afternoon, so come seek me out if you want to say Hi! I hope to report a dispatch or two throughout the week, talking about games or talks or whatever strikes my fancy, as I do. I’ll probably be spending a lot of time at the Microsoft booths.

After an abrupt collapse in 2010, it would seem that STALKER developer GSC Game World is back. At least, there are people saying it’s back, and doing interviews to that effect. But I’ve long since abandoned any illusions that reality will influence the state of things in Ukrainian game development.

You know, when I first heard this rumor yesterday – that Microsoft was in talks to buy Mojang Specifications for a cool $2.5 billion – I just rolled my eyes. Sure, I could see Microsoft wanting to do so, and anyone would like to have two and a half billion… but the Minecraft developer isn’t exactly low on funds. And, frankly, given Markus “Notch” Persson’s evident dislike of large-scale corporate buyouts, it seemed against character even if they were nearly bankrupt. And yet, it’s true. Even Mojang says so, and says also that Notch is leaving the company, along with its two other founders.

Destructoid posted this awesome little news article announcing that Atari (the company that got me started in the gaming industry) is not only bringing back two titles from the past, but adding a few to their arsenal as well. While the article focuses on Alone in the Dark and Haunted House (which will hopefully give us all the horror games we need), it’s really games Minimum and Roller Coaster Tycoon (for PC) that are of interest to me here.

It’s been a big week for World of Warcraft. The cinematic trailer for Warlords of Dreanor went live last week, and the usual updates regarding subscription numbers and future plans that we’ve all come to expect have been circulating through our Twitter feeds. On such article by IGN featuring a spread on WoW’s traditional, pre-expansion dwindling subscriber count, Game Director Tom Chilton discusses the plans for future expansions. The interesting thing about this article (listed below) is that Chilton expresses that the plan was for expacs to be released more frequently with shorter gaps in between. We all know that for the past expacs the rollout period has been approximately every two years, with a sizeable patch in between to break up the wait.

So it’s come to my attention that some people – by which I mean all people – misunderstood an earlier post I wrote, announcing the publication of Brilliance, my brother’s sixth novel. In this, the post announcing the publication of A Better World, my brother’s seventh novel, I will endeavor to set the record straight.

Hi Tap! I’m out at GDC 2014 this week, reporting from the expo and talking to the people who make the games. I hope to post some previews and news throughout the conference! This first writeup is just a trip report with some highlights from my first two/three days.

Historically, when a studio is successful, its leadership attempts to capitalize on that success while continuing the trend.

Old-skool thinking, proclaim a new and ballsy generation of game developers. Entirely red ocean. We are pioneers of a new strategy. These days, rather than attempting to build on a successful model, it’s trendy to kill the studio and fire everyone. It worked for GSC Game World, where Sergey Grigorovich shuttered the place and sacked about a hundred people rather than continue development on the promising, money-printing STALKER franchise. Evidently emboldened by this, Ken Levine at Irrational Games has decided to do basically the same thing – he is “winding” Irrational Games down, letting the vast majority of its staff go, and starting something new and smaller under the Take-Two banner.

Last week, talented gamers from the Speed Demos Archive participated in their annual games for charity run: Awesome Games Done Quick. Watching the stream has been so fascinating that I’ve forgotten to do many other things I theoretically should have done. But that seems to have been the case for many, as, very late Saturday night, the AGDQ stream made an incredible goal of one million dollars collected for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Austin Powers jokes ensued.

We don’t usually bother with news around here, but sometimes it’s News and deserves a remark.

The Industry said a collective “whoa” on Friday when it learned that John Carmack, programming megamind and id Software co-founder, creator of Doom and Quake and Rage, has left the company he built. Several months ago Carmack took on a new role as Chief Technology Officer at Oculus VR – they of the eventual Oculus Rift headset – and it’s on this role that he is going to focus his attention.

Happy Halloween, Tap-Repeatedly!

Time for the news.

This weekend I’m going to be participating in the Extra Life game charity drive. I’m playing games for 25 hours as part of the Schell Games team, benefiting the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. I hope you will consider donating to my page here! I’m getting closer to my goal and every extra bit helps kids.