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July 10, 2003
Asian Action
After chatting with <a href="http://www.links.net/daze/03/07/08/mo_bile.html">Justin Hall about his recent adventures in Tokyo</a>, a bunch of Asian threads came to mind, not least of which was a funny story of my own adventures in Japan... But, first the various other Asian threads:
- It will be interesting to see what effect the newly instituted "<a href="http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/latest/story/0,4390,198682,00.html?">gaming curfew</a>" will have on gamers in Thailand - both locally, and in other countries looking to curb play time...
- The IGDA's <a href="http://www.igda.jp/">Tokyo chapter</a> has been growing rapidly, and I am most impressed with the dedication of Kiyoshi Shin, the chapter's coordinator. As much as we all look to Japan for design inspiration, there is a severe lack of developer community that the chapter is working to address.
- The great Shigeru Miyamoto was interviewed by Kiyoshi at Tokyo University, <a href="http://www.video-fenky.com/features/miyamoto.html">the English transcript</a>, while a tad rough to read, contains some great nuggets of wisdom. I must say, I was surprised to hear that the ever docile Miyamoto "flips out" during meetings...
- I was recently invited to speak at the <a href="http://www.chinajoy.net">ChinaJoy conference</a>, to be held in Beijing in mid-January. It will be my first time going to China and I am very much looking forward to it!
OK, now on to the amusing story :)
I was in Tokyo about 5 years ago for a Microsoft DirectX technical conference. I was in a meeting with several executives from Sega and a legion of their programmers. We were conducting some testing of their recently ported PC version of Sega Rally, and the programmers were coding away furiously while the execs and I watched on. Given the language barrier there was not much being said. Then, all of a sudden, the building starts to gently sway/wobble (apparently, light tremors occur all the time, causing this style of motion in taller buildings). At the moment, I wasn't really sure what was going on, and the coders just hacked away, and the execs didn't really seem to care. So, in a sudden burst of inspiration I jumped to the window, drew open the blinds (which had been closed to prevent glare), pointed out and screamed "GOZILLA!!!". You know, as if the giant lizard was attacking the city and causing the earth to shake. Well, the Sega folks were not amused. They all just gave me stern, serious looks and got back to work.
Hehehe, well, I thought it was REALLY funny. I guess you had to be there.
Posted by della at July 10, 2003 01:06 AM
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Comments
Nice improv instincts!
Posted by: justin at July 10, 2003 01:20 AM
Haha that's awesome.
Sounds like something I would do except I would probably run away screaming afterwords to further confuse and avoid embarassment. :)
Posted by: Draigon at July 10, 2003 07:32 PM