So since this was my first GDC in San Francisco I would like to share my experience with you a bit.

I started in Hamburg (Germany) flying over New York to San Francisco so I had a nice 6 hour stopover in New York. 6 hours? Why is this nice? Because I managed to get into the city and this was really beautiful. New York is so much nicer than i remembered. Sun was shining and so I went into Central Park, got a newspaper and read it in the sun. i like :)

btw: pretty cool that people were still iceskating in NYC .. although it was about 12 degrees and very sunny :)

After about 24 hours of travel in total, i finally arrived in San Francisco and went to my hotel. Nice cable cars :) 

On Monday I got my badge from the GDC and then tried to get into the classes .. however my pass was not valid for the tutorials and lessons (I only bought the main conference pass) .. so I tried to get in them anyhow. At the beginning this  worked and i could enjoy some nice sessions. However on Tuesday I was told that my pass is not valid until Wednesday (i did not really know that at that time) ... and after being told that I could not go into the sessions anymore. So I used the nice weather for a stroll around the city.

 Here we go Golden Gate bridge ...

really very nice .. especially considering the bridge is about 100 years old and SFO even today has only about 800k people living there. Can you imagine Hannover having such a nice bridge? :)

So on Wednesday the "real" GDC finally began and the exhibiton floor finally up. This also meant that I had a lot of meetings and I could no longer attend the sessions as much as i wanted. Makes to sense to go to a session "How to work with publishers" if you have a meeting with a real publisher at the same time :)

Here is some impression of the exibition floor... really nice 3D demo with the Cryengine 3

Wonderful Artwork of our game "SoulCraft" being used to present the Tegra 3 at the NVIDIA booth :)

Thanks to Bigpoint for the best fair party on thursday evening with lots of Playboy bunnies. Also thanks to NVIDIA - they really have an amazing developer programm and take care of their partners!

and as a last picture a nice picture from Telegraph Hill with a view across the financial district of SFO.

To sum things up: the GDC is worth going to. Compared to big fairs such as the CeBIT in Hannover it is almost pathetically small. However all the important players of the gaming industry are there and you just cant afford to miss this. So see you guys next year.