I missed the "wall of game" thing at the Metreon center across the street. I'm actually a bit disappointed that I didn't see it because it seemed like the kind of event that would send chills reverberating throughout the entire city. Nolan Bushnell got a star on the walk for pioneering Atari and bringing video games to the masses. Mario the plumber and Sonic the Hedgehog received similar stars for being the animated bitmaps that sold the most game hardware. The guy who made Mario got a star, but the guy who made Sonic didn't. I guess in that case the achievements of the animated bitmap outshone those of the human being who actually made the effort to create it. Token "rat who went down with the TechTV ship" Adam Sessler was there, presumably gritting his teeth through the bottomless douchebaggitude of the whole sorry affair.

And yes I checked. Douchebaggitude does exist in the dictionary, so it's a perfectly cromulent word to use in normative conversationality.

Well, the expo floor opened today, and there was a serious mad crush of people that overwhelmed the folks at the gamedev.net booth, situated near the entrance. They gave away about several hundred T-shirts, and your own humble servant pitched in to help. I also hawked the pens that we're handing out like. . .free pens. I tried to sweeten the offer by loudly pointing out that gamedev.net pens are superior because they're not only capable of writing in ANY language, but they can also write in uppercase AND lowercase. That did get pens moving, so we were happy. T-shirts were an easier sell, because it seemed like everybody wanted the "I Make Games" shirts. From what I could see, gamedev's pretty well-received by those who know what it is.

Other observations: Sun's apparently given up the ghost as far as making workstation-class machines go. Their booth was staffed by several sexy-looking tower machines with teal faceplates. They also had shiny silver "Powered by AMD64" on 'em, so I presume that Sun's now doing high-end PC clones in sexy-looking cases.

John performs a moment of silent meditation for the demise of the SPARCStation.

The Nintendo keynote is today. I presume it'll be packed to the rafters given that Microsoft gave away a thousand TV's and everyone will wanna see if Nintendo can outdo 'em.

I think the free beer count between Oluseyi and myself was 16. I'll have to check the photographic records to be sure.