GDC Gallery: Game Developers Choice Awards, Expo Floor

With this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco complete, organizers have been collecting the event's substantial volume of visual documentation. This volume chronicles the Game Developers Conference's expansive expo floor as well as the star-studded Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony, featuring big winner Naughty Dog (Uncharted 2), host Warren Spector, special award recipients Gabe Newell, John Carmack, and Penny Arcade, and more. Earlier roundups from GDC -- part of the UBM Techweb Game Network, as is this website -- collected images from the show's many notable speaker sessions, and the Independent Games Festival Summit, Pavilion, and Awards. Game Developers Choice Awards 2010 These photographs highlight moments and personalities from this year's Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony, drawn from the considerable official GDC photo archive.

Ceremony host Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) sets a serious tone for the evening's proceedings.

"Now we have won all the awards," the Naughty Dog team could have said with relative accuracy, after picking up wins for Game of the Year, Best Writing, Best Technology, Best Visual Arts, and Best Audio.

Penny Arcade guys Mike Krahulik (l), Jerry Holkins (c), and Robert Khoo (r) are extremely satisfied with their Ambassador Award.

Runic Games' Travis Baldree (l) and Max Schaefer are pretty pleased with themselves for earning Torchlight the Best Debut Game award, because they've totally made video games before.

id Software's John Carmack (Doom, Rage) is an extraordinarily smart man.

"Valve's Gabe Newell (Half-Life, Portal) is one swell guy," said Chris Hecker (Spore, SpyParty) while introducing the Valve co-founder.

...and then Gabe Newell successfully trolled the entire Game Developers Conference. (The above blue screen of death was the second of three that he showed, and is part GlaDOS-ed.) Game Developers Conference 2010 Show Floor These pictures capture moments from the show floor as well as the surrounding conference areas.

Crytek (Far Cry, Crysis) employees explain their Germanic graphical wizardry to prospective employees -- but wait, is that a dangerous warning in the background?

Phew! Fortunately, it's the booth operated by High Voltage Software (The Conduit, The Grinder), and not a deadly electrical hazard on the GDC expo floor.

"What's that?!" exclaims a surprised GDC attendee leaving the exhibit hall. Nobody answers.

Just like the old proverb says, "Everybody wants to work for Blizzard Entertainment."

Being at a real live conference is no excuse not to spend hours tethered to your computer. (As press, we should know.)

"I'm awesome," Akira Yamaoka correctly thinks to himself as he descends into the bowels of GDC. But how even more awesome would it be if he were riding up an escalator backwards?

In keeping with tradition, the lonely bicycle man circles the GDC expo floor as the exhibitors take down their booths, signaling the end of another year's conference. [More pictures of the Game Developers Conference as a whole, taken by Vincent Diamante, are available on the Official GDC Flickr stream. Sarcastic post-GDC captions by Chris Remo.]