Member Article

International computer game conference comes to North East

An international computer gaming conference took place last week at the Sage Gateshead, with the North East being called a “centre of excellence” for computer games.

The two-day event, organised by Codeworks, invited top executives from the worlds of gaming, entertainment and business to talk about the future of the industry.

Darren Jobling, Director of Business Development at Eutechnyx, said: “The GameHorizon conference is the only one aimed at executives, so there’re much higher level talks of where we’re going, how we’re going to get there and what we do when we get there.

“Lots of conferences are aimed at the nuts and bolts of games development but this is much more aimed at the overall strategy of game development.”

He added: “I think what a lot of people don’t realise is that the North East historically has been a real centre of excellence for computer games.

“The North East generally tends to have one thing that it’s good at, so there’s one Nissan, there’s one Sage but in actual fact in its peak there was over four world class leading game developers in the North East, like Eutechnyx, Ubisoft, Reflection, Midway. So really the North East is known the world over for producing quality games, and it’s something that’s not really well publicised within the North East.

“The fact is that kids are sitting five miles away from the people who produced this great game, and they just don’t know that.”

Neil Parmer, director and co-founder of Bluegfx, a GameHorizon sponsor, said: “In the North East the gaming and development community work closer, they know a little bit more about what’s going on with each other and have a good compromise with equipment. There’s not as much poaching or competition going on.

“Then you have things like GameHorizon where you get people together to talk about what’s happening and where we’re all going – it’s really good.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .