GDC 08: Day 1

In my mind a very successful first day here in sunny San Francisco. The Career Pavilion at the Game Developers Conference has a great reputation as one of the best in the game industry. I found it to be full of great opportunities for those of us looking to get into the industry, if you are persistent. Most companies there are looking to hire people with experience and most positions available require at least 1 shipped title. However, the mythical internship opportunity does indeed exist. Now I am in a rare position that my degree can easily be finished no matter where I end up since I need mostly just general education classes to finish. This would allow me to accept a permanent position and still finish my degree so I do have a bit of flexibility. Now most of the bigger publishers who were there had staffed booths that were there basically to tell you to go checkout their website, but the folks at Activision were able to tell me to check in about a week when they will post their internship opportunities. 2k Games also gets a thank you for having a wonderful staff who took my interest to heart and really made me feel good about talking to them. However the best publisher booth I saw was THQ. These guys had at least one representative from each of their developers in attendance and were all more than willing to talk to a guy trying to break into games. Last but certainly not least were the folks from independent developer Day 1 Studios. Their staff were very interested in me and my search and for that I thank them.