Graeme Devine Melts Montreal Developers

by Jason Della Rocca (January 2003)

Over 300 developers and industry types braved the insanely cold weather to attend our January chapter meeting. Continuing with our plans to hold fewer, but bigger and more significant events, we invited Graeme Devine of id Software to demo Doom III and talk to us about his 25 years in the industry.

Before the chapter gathering, Graeme took time to visit the Centre NAD to chat with the students and have a look around the school. It was an exciting experience for the young students (most of which were not even alive when Graeme was coding Atari games), and a great chance for Graeme to get a sense of the growing industry and wealth of talent we have in Montreal.

The chapter event kicked off with a demo of Doom III (the same one shown at E3 2002). Despite the anemic audio set up of our projector, the demo was indeed impressive to watch. It goes without saying that the graphics were stunning and the gameplay gave you the sense of playing a horror movie...

After the Doom demo, Graeme talked about his start in the industry some 25 years ago coding on a TRS-80. He walked through his career, relating it to the various eras in the game industry and its effect on team sizes and the creative process. Looking towards the future, he believes that games will be produced like movies - with a small core team and specialized talent brought in on a contract basis. All in all, it was an interesting talk, full on humor and anecdotes, with a great audience Q&A period to close the session.

Afterwards, everyone hung around for a drink and to chat with Graeme and fellow developers.

Big thanks to our sponsors

• Havok
• Kaydara
• Algoma University CGT Conference
• Ministère Finances, Économie et Recherche
• Alliance NumeriQC

And, of course, thanks to our volunteers who helped out: Josie St-Amour, Jonathan Mileshik, François Perreault and Isabelle Marazzani.

January Gathering Pictorial

...here are just a few shots I took during the January gathering of the Montreal Chapter. (all persons are identified from left to right)

The packed auditorium at the Gesù.

Graeme chats with Su Skerl (Wanadoo) after his presentation.

Eric Vigneault (Multimediarts), Noemie Dupuy (Wave Generation), Gregan Dunn (Strategy First) and David Lipes (Wave Generation) keeping warm.

Graeme checks out student modelling work at Centre NAD.

Graeme hanging out with students from Centre NAD.