Boston GameLoop 2009 Preview

Over the weekend a couple of the nycgameindustry.com crew made our way to Boston for their annual GameLoop unconference. We plan on doing a full featured rundown of the event next month, but in the meantime we wanted to give everyone a brief overview of what we took away.

While at the show we were able to learn a lot, and I mean A LOT, about what it takes to run an established and prospering game development community. We took extensive notes and you’re going to start seeing some of what we learned materialize very soon.

The thing is, Boston’s community mirrors New York’s in many different ways. This is most evident in the passion and respect Boston game developers have for their city and the vast range of talented studios in their region. While sitting in on various lectures and roundtables, I was constantly impressed with the level of professional camaraderie prevalent amongst Boston developers. It’s something we have in New York too, and it’s great to see it demonstrated so strongly in other nearby cities as well.

That’s not to say we were completely surrounded by Bostonians, there were a couple of other out-of-towners there as well. One dev had actually traveled all the way from Los Angeles to attend. That said, one interesting thing of note (and I found this quite telling) was the fact that by the end of the after party, the only people left at the bar were New Yorkers… oh, and one guy from Connecticut. I guess all those Drink Nights have really helped us build up our tolerance to alcohol! ;-)

In short, GameLoop was awesome and we look forward to attending again next year. Thanks to all the organizers and as mentioned before, expect to see a full feature on the event posted here in the next week or so.

Until next time...

~The nycgameindustry.com team