August 24th - Day Two

At 7:00 am, the alarm goes off. Continuing from Wednesday, it's going to be another exhausting but informative day at the convention. Another Adventure-Treff colleague, Sebastian "basti007" Grünwald, surprised us at breakfast, having traveled that morning from deepest Bavaria in order to tell his favorite female adventure game designer where he had just come from.

Having arrived at the convention, the first thing to do was to upload the fruits of last night's writing onto the Internet. While I took care of this glamorous task, my colleagues took incredible, incomprehensible photos of themselves posing with Speed-Link booth babes, telling me: "You schmuck! You're resizing photos, while we… mwahaha! See for yourself!" The ladies! The car hoods! The handcuffs! I should write a book: The Opportunities One Passes Up.

Our walk towards the convention hall was interrupted first when we ran into our Adventure Corner colleague Matthias Mangelsdorf, and then superstar developer Will Wright (who, in contrast with Matthias, did not say hello), and finally by our watches, alerting us to the first appointment on our schedule…

Which would be the dtp press conference featuring Jane Jensen, in which the first details about Gray Matter were to be revealed. Crowds were already gathered around her in the conference room, as if she was Robbie Williams. Or as if she was sitting on a car hood by the Speed-Link booth. In any case, there was flashing of cameras around Jensen as I have never before seen at the GC. Putting our journalistic integrity at risk, we had our Gabriel Knight boxes signed, and then listened to the presentation and asked a couple of questions. We will write a dedicated article about what we learned in a few days.

Right afterwards came our appointment with Crimson Cow, where Georg Hach and Kai Fiebig chatted with us about The Abbey and A Vampyre Story. At first the conversation was about the Name of the Rose-inspired comic adventure from Alcachofa Soft. The concept of this game, however, has been radically revised. All the pictures and information published so far might therefore only very approximately reflect the final style of the game.

Of Bill Tiller's new comic adventure from the land of the vampires, we got to see a ten minute-long storyboard film. This consisted of only roughly animated storyboard sketches, but was already good for a lot of laughs from the audience. If the humor maintains the level of quality of this concept trailer, we have little to worry about when it comes to this title. A short presentation was also given about Atlantis V, but it told us very little new about the game.

From Crimson Cow we made our way purposefully to Koch Media, where we again had the opportunity to chat for a quarter of an hour with Secret Files: Tunguska developer Marco Zeugner. He received the latest magazine ratings from PC Powerplay (83%, up there with Broken Sword 4) with a mix of delighted satisfaction and a hint of suppressed disappointment at the information.




Next stop was at House of Tales, where Martin Ganteföhr took the time for an hour-long presentation of Overclocked, and described the cinematic presentation of the title. You will of course be able to read more about that in a new preview report shortly.

Later still there were meetings with Private Moon Studios, who had interesting details to share about Yoomurjak's Ring, and Future Games, whom we talked to about Reprobates and their other title (developed by a separate team), Tale of a Hero. Especially interesting was the announcement that after these two titles, Future Games would like to move away from pre-rendered backgrounds and only develop in full 3D.




After this, the schedule called for me to make my farewell stroll through the Business Center, since Thursday was to be my last day at the GC this year. It had suddenly become necessary for me to leave Leipzig early the next morning, so our GC 2006 visit has been cut unexpectedly short.






Adventure Gamers thanks Jan Schneider and the rest of the Adventure-Treff team for their insightful reports out of GC. Despite the abbreviated coverage directly from the convention, stay tuned for more in-depth impressions of the games at the show.