GDC. Day One.

1:20pm.

The sun is high in the sky, and I’m jogging toward the Moscone Center – a large, sprawling building with one foot in art deco architecture, and the other half in post-modernism. I briefly glance at the hundreds of intellectuals, gamers, coders, writers, students, artists and sound engineers, all meandering aimlessly with black “GDC 09″ tote bags slung over their shoulders.

I told Jenova Chen that I’d meet him in the main lobby in ten minutes — that was fifteen minutes ago. My cell phone rings again, and the VOICEMAIL message flashes intermittently. I see a young man twenty feet ahead of me, dressed carefully in a brown corduroy jacket, sliding his iPhone into the inside breast pocket as he moves toward the exit. It has to be him.

I mutter a quick apology, and follow him toward the Moscone North building, hoping to launch a conversation along the way. He is careful and thoughtful — not drawn out of himself too quickly. So I settle down and try to recompose myself. I think to myself: look, you’ve got a thousand questions you want to ask him, but only five of them really matter. He looks like a busy guy, so don’t waste his time.

“Um. Want to find a place to talk?”

I realize that I’ve been staring wordlessly the whole time, and Jenova reminds me of why I’m here in the first place.

I recover slightly: ”Yeah. Let’s find some place quieter.” 

We head over to a deserted conference room, and the questions start. Surprisingly, he asks me the first question, and knocks the ritual off-balance.

“So you’re interested in artful games. How would you define art?” he asks, raising an eyebrow inquisitively.

I’m dazed slightly – a question that I’m always prepared to answer with the foreknowledge that any definition will slip through my fingers like sand. I respond carefully, tentatively, and we go from there. We’re talking – pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of one another and the world. I get the sense that he’s playing me along at first; he’s used to the mindless questions that media lob at him like slow-pitch balls, waiting for him to knock ‘em out of the park like a well-practiced heavy hitter. I counter with my own critique of art games, and he dives into the inspirations and intentions that led to Flower…

I’m debating art and games with Jenova Chen. And I’m loving it.

6:15pm.

I’m walking back to the escalators, riding high from my earlier conversation, and fresh from the last remaining hours of the (very informative) “Learn Better Game Writing in a Day” tutorial by Evan Skolnick. As I near the escalators, I glance at a man leaning against a pillar thumbing text messages into his iPhone. His hair is thick and black, streaked with the occasional silvery threads. I know his face, and moreso that unmistakable mane. Images of dark corridors full of German Shepherds and Mauser-wielding Nazis fill my head; and the distant snargling of imps fills my ears.

It is John Romero. Grinning at some message on his iPhone like a well-groomed madman.

I walk up to him, and shake his hand hurriedly, thanking him for all the games he’s designed over the years. He seems genuinely appreciative and disarming… I relax a twinge. I mention some of the Apple ][e classics that I grew up loving — he talks about his experiences assembling assembly language by hand. 

“By hand? No shit?” Imagining the sheer complexity of assembling lines of assembly language, without the use of a computer, stuns me. My jaw is hanging by a few threads, and I’m sure he notices.

“Yeah. When we moved to England we had to pack all of our belongings in a crate, and they took 6 months to get shipped to us. So I didn’t have my Apple II, and I needed to program.. so..”

The next three hours are filled with similar kinds of stories – the wild exploits of a console cowboy elegantly hacking his way through programming challenge after challenge. A few months at Origin, porting “2400 A.D.” to the Commodore 64. A missed chance at working for Looking Glass Technologies (aka. Blue Sky Productions). You name it, he dunnit. We swap stories about our game collections, and I get the sense that his makes my collection look like the efforts of a 9-year-old fanboy. I’ve never met anyone else with such an encyclopedic knowledge of games from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. I now truly understand what it means for someone to love games – he does not distinguish between his life and video games.

I’m shootin’ the shit with John Romero. Easygoing, friendly, neighbourhood, John fracking Romero. And I’m loving it.

This is the GDC.