Israel Games Conference 2008 and more

This week has been a very eventful week here in Israel. It started with TheMarker's COMvention. TheMarker is a leading financial paper here and it throws an annual 2 day internet conference.

The conference attracted internet talents from abroad including Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig's List, The known blogger Robert Scoble, Dan Dubno (Digital Dan), who is always fun to watch when he shows off his gadgets and many more.

Overall the conference was good and insightful, and I got the opportunity of catching up with some of my local colleagues after spending a lot of time either in business trips abroad or "caged" in the office...

In between the days of the conference I went to a BBQ at the GarageGeeks. The GarageGeeks are a bunch of cool geeks (weird combo...) that create all sorts of cool things, or more accurately, things that geeks would think are cool... For example I saw at their warehouse a "Guitar Heronoid" which is basically a robot playing guitar hero... Anyway it was fun, these guys throw these events every once in a while, if you have a chance go there.

But the real treat, at least for me, was the GameIS 2008 conference. This is the Israeli annual gaming conference, and it grows every year. This time I saw so many new faces. Aside from technologies and platforms for games, there are also real titles coming out of Israel. Battledawn is a good example of a PBBG game that started as a bootstrap and is now a profitable company without taking even a dime from any VC. The game succeeded in creating a vibrant community around it, and many of the game ideas/assets were contributed by the community, and in fact almost all of the current employees come from its worldwide community...

Another promising game and less casual is Rising Eagle, this is a full 3D multiplayer shooter/strategy game, also coming from an independent Israeli company. Very impressive.

Aside from those we saw a lot of young game developers starting with the 16-years olds that developed Portal: The flash version going through 2 game "deselopers" as they call themselves (designer-developer) from Pilon Games that make flash for ICQ to the duo who made the hilarious low-budget Hebrew quest "Boundless Happiness" about a guy that decides to run for prime minister after getting a 9M bill from social security...

It was a very interesting and fun day, it looks like the industry has made some real progress since last year (I wrote about last year's conference here) and I already can't wait to see what's coming next year...

Since Passover is upon us, I will conclude by wishing happy holidays to all those who celebrate it - see you after the holidays!