GDC Vault Reveals Most-Watched GDC 2011 Talks As Views Top 250,000

Author: by Staff

As views of GDC Vault's video, audio and slides from GDC 2011 top 250,000, the site has detailed the most-viewed sessions from the March show, spanning Doom postmortems through Halo: Reach and beyond. The specially constructed website archives multimedia from the numerous lectures, panels, and keynotes at the multiple Game Developers Conference shows yearly, and a number of each show's most popular talks are now available for free. The sessions available on the GDC Vault spanning the last 15+ years have attracted 155,000 unique viewers in the last year, and the content from Game Developers Conference 2011 alone has attracted more than 262,000 views since mid-March. GDC 2011's Classic Game Postmortem series has proven the most popular by far, with video of these seminal talks making up six of the show's top 10 most-viewed sessions. These lectures featured various industry legends reflecting on their most seminal classics, including John Romero and Tom Hall on Doom, Eric Chahi on Out of This World/Another World, Ron Gilbert on Maniac Mansion, and more. Other popular talks included "I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach," featuring Bungie's David Aldridge on the studio's approach to online infrastructure, and "Life and Death and Middle Pair: Go, Poker and the Sublime," a talk featuring Area/Code's Frank Lantz on some of the oldest and most influential games in history. The following are the top 10 most-viewed GDC 2011 video sessions on the GDC Vault, including current view counts: Top 10 Most-Viewed Sessions From GDC 2011 1. "Classic Game Postmortem - DOOM," John Romero & Tom Hall, 27,970 Views [Video] 2. "Classic Game Postmortem - Out of This World/Another World," Eric Chahi, 19,960 Views [Video] 3. "Classic Game Postmortem - Maniac Mansion," Ron Gilbert, 14,420 Views [Video] 4. "Classic Game Postmortem - Pitfall!," David Crane, 10,530 Views [Video] 5. "Classic Game Postmortem - Prince of Persia," Jordan Mechner, 8,601 Views [Video] 6. "I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach," David Aldridge, 8,390 Views [Video] 7. "1-Hour Video Game MBA," Charlie Cleveland, 6,656 Views [Video] 8. "Life and Death and Middle Pair: Go, Poker and the Sublime," Frank Lantz, 6,020 Views [Video] 9. "Classic Game Postmortem - Bejeweled," Jason Kapalka, 5,940 Views [Video] 10. "Automated Level of Detail Generation for Halo: Reach," Xi Wang, 5,560 Views [Members Only] Several talks from Game Developers Conference 2010 have also seen similarly impressive audiences on the GDC Vault. Brenda Brathwaite's "Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)" [Video] and Zynga's "Engineering Scalable Social Games," [Video] for instance, have both surpassed 20,000 views each. Some of the most popular titles from GDC Online 2010 include Professor Richard Bartle's "MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance" [Video] and Brian Reynolds' "Bears and Snakes! The Wild Frontier of Social Game Design," [Video] both of which have topped 5,000 views apiece. Besides the multitude of free videos and slides, full GDC Vault access is available to GDC 2011 All-Access Pass holders, speakers, and All-Access Pass buyers to other GDC events for the rest of 2011. (Subscribers having issues accessing content should contact GDC Vault admins.) Individual Vault subscriptions not tied to All-Access passes are now available in a limited-edition Beta invite process -- those interested in signing up to be invited in on a first come, first served basis should sign up on the GDC Vault website. In addition, game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company. More information on this option is available via viewing an online demonstration.