My trip to Quakecon began yesterday, with our morning flight out of Seattle to Dallas Texas. The flight, despite being 4 hours long, disappeared very quickly as I read World War Z. If you’re a fan of the Zombie Survival Guide you will like it.
Because of time zone differences we landed around 5pm Dallas Time, and then spent the best part of an hour and a half just getting out of the airport. Eventually we made it to the Hilton Anatole, the hotel hosting Quakecon, and before we knew it we had our room.
With our room sorted our next task was to find the Quakecon registration queue and join it. With memories of last year’s epic multi-hour wait in the queue the night before firmly burned in I fully anticipated being there until two in the morning. Fortunately the queue was small, fast moving, and before we knew it we were fully signed up Quakecon BYOC attendees.
With the events not beginning until the following day, we grabbed some food and headed to sleep in anticipation.
Day 12 begins, and we head down to the BYOC and Exhibition hall to check out the sponsors booths. On the way in we can’t help but notice the gigantic queue formed that spills out of the room and around the hallway, far surpassing the queues of the night before.
After making our way past the horde we headed into the exhibition hall, where all of the Sponsor’s booths are located.
This year around Bethesda Softworks have a much larger booth than last year with demo machines for Brink, Fallout New Vegas and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.
After wandering around, playing games on machines provided by the vendors, and watching the unveiling of the prize cars we headed off to the Level Design Panel to see the first of the game development panels. The panel had level designers from iD, Bethesda, Splash Damage.
Afterwards we headed to the Main Stage to watch the iD software welcome and John Carmack’s keynote. The welcome was, as always, given by iD software’s CEO Todd Hollenshead.
Sadly this year there was to be no new information about Doom 4.
The introduction was followed by John Carmack’s annual keynote. Because of the merger with Zenimax John was able to take on a more technical role within iD software and as such his keynote was a lot more technical than last year’s was.
This year John Carmack decided to do two entirely new things. He gave a demonstration of some tech he made up in short order – he had managed to port the Rage engine to the iPhone. It ran at 60FPS and had stunning graphics which were so detailed and crisp you wouldn’t believe they were running on a phone.
He also ran an entirely separate keynote to talk about Armadillo Aerospace and it’s partnership with Space Adventures called Rocket Talk. Both of these keynotes ran for two hours each and included Q&A sessions. The Rocket Talk session included talks from John Carmack about Armadillo Aerospace and Richard Garriott.
Richard Garriott was responsible for the Ultima series of games, as well as Tabula Rasa, and spent 12 days in Space including a 10 day stint aboard the International Space Station. At the Rocket Talk he tells his story in fine detail about the lead up and eventual trip to and from space.
After the Rocket talk John Carmack continued to talk to an ever shrinking group of fans outside of the halls (I was there, it was good), and I even had a conversation with him and a few others about mobile development and the Android platform.
The keynotes were over and I finally decided to make it back to the BYOC and fire up my computer for the first time during QC2010.
Looking forward to hearing more about the rest of QuakeCon, and even more interested in seeing this year’s T-Shirt ^_^