Before I forget, a few pics that ended up on Flickr…

Images by Mat, of course. A few more (just a few!!) are on the official Flickr feed for us.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity – ‘Captive’ by Will Carpenter

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

Guild Wars – ‘No Beautiful Day’ by Melanie Lauterbach

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

A few links ‘n’ things I thought you might be interested in….

Couple of Aion previews

Pre-Leipzig we gave an exclusive Aion preview to PCGZine, who visited the office and got loads of ‘stuff’ from us that they’ve put together into a six-page preview. In case you didn’t know, they’re a PDF-based online magazine, so you don’t even have to go to the shops to read it.

Anyway, you can grab the PDF file right here and have a peruse. It’s supposed to be ‘interactive’ with rollover videos and stuff, which might work in Acrobat, but I’ll tell you right now doesn’t work on a Mac.

If you’d prefer a preview that isn’t in PDF format, you might enjoy this look at Aion from The Escapist, who aren’t generally known for their hyperbole. They like what they saw at the recent press preview in San Francisco, which is all good news.

The things fans do…

We spent a lot of our time during GC on our feet, but we never made the commitment to distance that a few of our more dedicated Aion fansites did. A number of them banded together to basically walk the length and breadth of Leipzig (as in, the town) and get pictures of every Aion billboard we had there.

Apart from being proof that yeah, we spent a bit of money on the game’s promotion, it also proves undeniably that our fans are mad, crazy people who we love to bits. See the photographic proof of this true ‘Quest for GC’ in this Flickr set.

Yep, that’ll be Martin with a shark tank, as presented to him by a fan during the show. (Our Marketing Manager, Mirko, is on the right.) That’ll be a direct reference to my dialogue, then….

Last but not least – AionSource‘s t-shirt of GC, featuring fan art based on The Shark, as modelled by Martin, constructed by Chris, and conceived by me in Episode 6.

Fan-made merch. Love it.

Off today. And tomorrow. And Saturday. And Sunday.

The last two might not seem that surprising, but believe me, it’s a strange feeling to have nothing particular on, that I absolutely must do… for four days straight.

Anyway, pawing through my bag this morning I found a couple of GC-related artifacts that I thought I’d share, for no particular reason:

My personal Games Convention schedule, extremely worn after being in my back pocket for about seven days (next to my passport). Scribbled times at the top indicate when the bus left our hotel. Everything else is pretty much how it happened, except for character arrival times – they came on the bus too, in the end.

That there would be my exhibitor pass, with my NCsoft-branded lanyard on it (Not sure if we have any of those left; if we do, expect to see them at future shows…).

Attached to it is a key… which I didn’t really remember I had attached until I put it into my luggage on Monday. It’s the key to the dressing room (well, truth be told, to all of the backstage areas on the stand) and even though it didn’t get used much, to me it’s a perfect symbol of the show… and a great souvenir.

So, Games Convention 2008 is done. I would say “We came, we saw, we kicked ass” but I’m too tired to muster the energy for that sort of hyperbole.

I’m tapping away in the hotel restaurant, picking away at breakfast while surrounded by a mix of American flight attendants, youth football teams, and hungover colleagues. Last night was, well, the last night – so there will probably be a few sore heads on the way home. The last thing I wanted was a hangover threading through a long trip home, so it was a relatively early – and booze-free – night for me.

In lieu of having much intelligent commentary at this point, here’s some lazy list writing.

Things I won’t miss about GC

1. The people. Not the people of Leipzig, or Germany per se, but the sheer number of people at GC. I don’t mind crowds, but seriously.
2. Late nights and early mornings. ‘Nuff said.
3. A near-constant voice in my ear. Radios good. Near constant chatter bad.
4. T-shirts. Getting rid of 20,000 was quite a chore, in so many ways.

Things I will miss about GC

1. The people. Those around me right now.
2. The coffee at the hotel in the morning. Was it the cream or the coffee? We may never know, but it was liquid gold every single time.
3. The rush. When it’s good, it’s great.
4. This moment, right now.

Not quite a guitar gently weeping, is it? Trust me, it’s better than last night’s ‘dying caribou moaning over the sound of a biplane crashing’ noises I barely managed to sleep through.

So, Day Two (of FIVE) is done, and it basically feels like we’ve “done a Memorabilia” only with more Germans. A lot more Germans. Tomorrow the show extends from today’s 9am to 6pm stint, to a staggering 11-hour opening time – 9am to 8pm. While we do have just about all the catered food and drinks we can ask for (don’t get excited; I’m talking sandwiches and soda) the sheer physical endurance side of things starts to really come in now.

Hence all of us collapsing into bed early. Well, early-ish. Having working Internet is too good an opportunity to pass up.

Anyway. It’s going well. It feels like an odd mix of our ‘usual show’ (especially as we’re here with some familiar faces) and something much, much larger and crazier. Also as we don’t have one big event as we did two years ago (the Guild Wars Factions World Championships) the spotlight is much more on the community team, who I’m proud to help soar to new heights.

If yesterday was really the early rehearsals, and today was full dress, then tomorrow’s the first performance. Let’s hope we’re good.

Hot and bothered on the show floor. That’ll be the lights, then.

While I swelter and work on final A/V touches I just wanted to let you know about the ‘Live!’ page that I’ve created here – easy enough to find, it’s at totheblogmobile.com/live/

The idea’s pretty simple – gather all the material that’s getting posted to the web from here at GC. There you’ll find my Twitter feed, streaming video files from Qik, our Flickr photos, the official Vodcast (currently just Quest for GC, but more is coming) and even more stuff probably before too long.

Anyway; if you don’t see any new posts here, feel free to visit that page and you’re bound to see something.

Day Five, anyway. LAST DAY! WOOOOOOOO!!!!

Stacks of MOO boxes

More MOO cards

Stacks and stacks and stacks

Cards being sorted

Saturday cards, lined up