The meeting on Thursday 7th June turned out to be another great night for the Midlands IGDA Chapter, once again in the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa - a great venue, so big thanks to Audiomotion for the sponsorship making this possible and of course to BlueGFX for the sponsorship of the bar – always very welcome.
So this time it was Sony’s turn; TIGA co-sponsored the main prize of the evening, a PlayStation 3, George Bain came along to tell us all about the PS3 and we had 4 PS3 pods in the main hall showcasing some current PS3 games.
Evolution Studios’ ‘MotorStorm’, Insomniac Games’ ‘Resistance: Fall of Man’, Eurocom’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End’ and Neversoft Entertainment’s ‘Tony Hawk’s Project 8’ all had crowds around them for the majority of the evening!
We were very pleased to welcome Fred Hasson, CEO of TIGA, who opened the evening by giving a short presentation of what The Independent Games Developers Association does for the development community and how TIGA works to inform the government so that British developers are viewed and treated as a serious industry.
Fred talked about the differences between IGDA and TIGA and how they complement each other, and explained that these organisations exist to help to ensure that the environment for developing games stays viable and enjoyable.
Many developers present commented warmly on Fred’s talk, saying that they felt much more informed about TIGA’s work. Particular interest was expressed in his account of what the Canadian government are doing to help the Canadian games industry.
George Bain, SCEE’s 3rd Party Relations Manager then gave a great talk, showing several exciting videos of games that have either just been released or are coming soon. He also spoke about the PSN and why it’s such an exciting development.
George went on to show us a demo of HOME, Sony’s forthcoming PS3 social network site, showing how it functions as a place to view trophies, play mini-games and watch movies in a very mass market, user-friendly environment; it's certainly going to be a very exciting development for PS3 owners. See the video here.
The rest of the evening was about networking, meeting old friends at other companies etc.
Over a hundred people attended the event and whilst around a third were from Blitz, there were also people from many other companies in the area including Sega, Rare, Codemasters, Rebellion, Freestyle, BigBig, Stickman, Gusto Games and Strawdog.
We’d like to encourage all members and people on the email reminders to circulate the details of future events around their companies so that as many developers as possible get the chance to come and mingle.
Finally, we held the usual raffle to help raise money to cover the expenses of running the event, and the lucky winners were:
1st prize: Mikey Higgs of Blitz Games won the coveted PS3 and a copy of MotorStorm, donated by TIGA.
2nd prize: Rob Shaer of BigBig Studios won a Sony goody bag, donated by Sony.
3rd prize: Martin Wood, Codemasters
4th: Chris Hudson, Blitz Games
5th: Chris Davies, Sega Racing Studio
6th: Eoin Loughrey
The winners of the free prize draw from the business card drop were:
James Horn, Freestyle Games
David Fewtrell, Blitz Games
Chris Hudson, Blitz Games
Chris Swan, Blitz Games
See – we need more people to balance out the Blitz winners ;)
The next Midlands IGDA event will be in November and we hope to feature a panel discussion with representatives from local developers. It would be great to see you there!
We were very pleased to welcome Fred Hasson, CEO of TIGA, who opened the evening by giving a short presentation of what The Independent Games Developers Association does for the development community and how TIGA works to inform the government so that British developers are viewed and treated as a serious industry.
George Bain, SCEE’s 3rd Party Relations Manager then gave a great talk, showing several exciting videos of games that have either just been released or are coming soon. He also spoke about the PSN and why it’s such an exciting development. 
The rest of the evening was about networking, meeting old friends at other companies etc.
