Pics from Our GDC Booth

First of all, before we get started, THANK YOU SO MUCH! The donation response we saw last week has, I'm happy to say, met our internal goals for starting to build this dream into a full-fledged company. We've still got a million ways to grow, and I'm excited to have you all on board while we do that, but for now we've proven out the concept: there's obviously enough interest in our idea to make it a reality, and we're comfortable enough now that I have the bandwidth to work on this more-or-less full time, without having to get too distracted by my game development consultancy work.

We've been a little less communicative with you than I would have liked, mainly because last week was incredibly hectic. As many of you know, we launched last Monday with a big livestream event over at IGN. And then, right after that, we actually set up and displayed at GDC for the entire week.

I just posted a mini gallery over on the GameHistory.org blog, which you can find here:

https://gamehistory.org/a-look-back-at-our-gdc-2017-display/

But since you guys have shown that you want to dig a little deeper and get more involved, I thought I'd share some quick backer-exclusive notes with you about our showing.

As I reflect on the week, I guess I'd call my feelings mixed. While having a presence at GDC is, as far as I'm concerned, 100% mandatory, I don't know that being stuck at a booth space tucked away in the expo hall is the best use of my time at the show. I had some amazing conversations at the booth, and it was great that people who wanted to speak to me knew where to find me, but I had the sinking feeling all show long that I really should have been out in the halls and in private meetings, spreading awareness for what we're doing and starting conversations with industry veterans about how they should handle their materials, and what historians would actually consider important for telling stories. I'd consider having a booth again next year, but I might have a volunteer team instead of my approach this year, which was to be present as constantly as possible so that we'd always have a "home base" I could be reached at.

That said: when I think back to how excited attendees were playing games like Sound Fantasy, I feel like if nothing else, I've given a little something back to the show that has been constantly inspiring me for over a decade now. I really like the idea of a new generation of game developers finding new ideas in old games, and I hope that a foundation like ours can help to facilitate that.

A couple quick things that I'm proud of:

We decided to source 4:3 aspect ratio LCD monitors rather than lugging in CRTs or using modern widescreen displays. This gave us three major benefits: all games were presented in their original aspect ratios, photos of the screen were easy to take and share (this is hard to do with CRTs), and it gave us more display space to play with, allowing us to squeeze five games into the booth.

For the console games, we tapped straight into the system RGB lines, and used external scalers to get clean images on the screen. This resulted in crisp, clean images, despite being from original hardware rather than emulation. For the Genesis we used a Framemeister, and for the SNES we used a vintage XRGB-2 - this was particularly important, as that model doesn't introduce much in the way of input lag (being a simple line-doubler). I find that most people aren't all that susceptible to the minimal lag of the Framemeister, but given that Sound Fantasy is a mouse-based game requiring basically 1-to-1 intput-to-display timing, we wanted to make sure that we reduced it as much as possible.