World Cyber Games fest

Yesterday I dropped in on the World Cyber Games festival, which is being held here in San Francisco at the Civic Center. This annual festival is absolutely massive when held in South Korea; here it’s a bit smaller but still significantly larger than I expected. I visited the festival with Jamil Moledina of the Game Developers Conference, and while we were there we bumped into Alex Handy, the new editor-in-chief of Game Developer magazine. If we’d had Jennifer Olsen with us (another former editor-in-chief of GDmag), there would have been too much fissile material in one place, and we probably would have exploded in a shower of red pens and arcade tokens.

The WCG really did take up all of Civic Center plaza in front of City Hall. It was quite impressively huge. There were skateboard half-pipes set up, a trapeze swing, cars with DJs from local radio stations, big tents with sponsors showing off their latest wares (Vivendi, Samsung, Creative, Shuttle, etc), and a huge screen and podium for showing the final matches. Crazy stuff!
I took a few shots indoors as well; Alex showed us around as he’d been there for some time. Check out this shot of the inside of Bill Graham civic auditorium, where the tournament was taking place. (The bring-your-own-computer event was taking place in a different area.) This is three camera shots quickly pasted together, apologies for the seam.

Pretty frickin’ impressive!
On the way home I found one of the SF hearts that I just had to take a picture of – you get it, right? “I left my heart in San Francisco”? Anyway, this is one of my favorites. 🙂