Wada, Mizuguchi, and Garriott to Appear at GDC 2006

[fitbabits]

Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com) has the details (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7662).

Joining already announced speakers such as Will Wright and Peter Molyneux are Ultima creator Richard Garriott, presenting a session on "Designing Tabula Rasa: Lessons From The World Of MMOs", Square Enix president Yoichi Wada, making a rare Western appearance to discuss "Taking Games Beyond Consoles", and Epic Games president Tim Sweeney, discussing "Building A Flexible Game Engine."

In addition, Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Phantagram's Sangyoun Lee will combine for 'Living 99 Nights: An Xbox 360 Postmortem', Wideload's Alex Seropian will discuss "Creating Stubbs The Zombie with the Wideload Model', and Namco's Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi is confirmed to reprise his role in the 'Game Design Challenge', following his virtuoso appearance at a similar event during GDC Europe 2005.
I'd love to attend one of these conferences!

[Nite_Moogle]

I would pay to have these presentations on DVD.

Edit: also, lol @ The Cat Whisperer

[drakkarim]

bah, it'll be all talk and smoke, like microsoft wanting to make the world a better place... as long as you agree to their EULA and don't try to copy their technology at risk of getting their lawyers up your a*s.

the people mentioned in the articles have too great of egos to ever share anything and work together to create something bigger then the individual parts.

and "flexible game engine" is synonymous with episodic content, sequals, putting licensing before content, and milking the consumer.

BAHUMBUG I SAY!! :)

[Darcydian]

The GDC's end up getting more of my attention than E3 does most of the time. It was last year at GDC Europe that we all got to watch and listen to Will Wright talk about Spore and content creation. Facinating presentation if you haven't watched it. It's a good hour long too.
This one looks to be just as good.

[Racknahm]

I had heard that in '07 my school will be allowing students to attend GDC.

[Lint of Death]

Mysterious Will Wright talk, eh? Well, it better be about Spore. Since the last GDC, there has been absolutely nothing about it. No news, no screenshots, no website updates, and I have received not one message from their newsletter despite having signed up at least 8 months ago. How dare he hide something like this from me :mad:

[fushi]

Wish I could be there. I've seen videos of Will Wright, Keita Takahashi and Mizuguchi giving speeches and they were all interesting/entertaining enough to warrant a 1hour+ watching. GDCTV.com will hopefully provide them in video form.

[Ailer]

Why has Richard Garriott not been mentioned in any comments hmmm? For awhile now I've really wanted him to once again start making games(read: single player), but no, he has to go off and do some damn MMORPG that is likely to fail cause none of the fucking kids know who he is and how awesome stuff he touches is.

GAH!

[TKO]

Why has Richard Garriott not been mentioned in any comments hmmm? For awhile now I've really wanted him to once again start making games(read: single player), but no, he has to go off and do some damn MMORPG that is likely to fail cause none of the fucking kids know who he is and how awesome stuff he touches is.

GAH!
Y'know .. I'd almost agree with ya there, but these days I'm just going back to revisiting the old Ultimas (I stopped caring about them around VII) and playing around with ADOM and other roguelikes. Really, I can't see him doing anything I like of that old-school form again.

I did have the last single-player one: Ultima Ascension? Number ten? Nice concept, but with the whole world at that scale I just found myself doing lots of lots of lots of walking. I'd like them to be less doom-like thanks. ;)

Don't get me wrong though. Absolutely top bloke, Mr Garriot. He made the first and best RPGs that consumed my adolescent gaming days. Ultimas III to VI will always be awesome memories.

[Ailer]

VII is often rated the highest of the ultimas, I personally enjoyed IV the most. And IX, the final one, did have alot of walking, but the walks had things off to the side in the same way that morrowind had. To bad the game was a broken mess from day one, and, get this, unbeatable if fully patched.

Ever since Lazaraus came out, my dreams of the Ultimas being remade are more likely then ever to occur. I even had a really great idea of how to do it. The owner of the Ultima property could licence out the original games to other companies for some small fee, and we could have every ultima remade by a diffrent company. The only regulation would be that they have to keep all the stuff from the original game, adding whatever they wish.

It'll never happen, but it's a nice thing to dream of.