Happy 2010!

This is Mike Worth, the owner of Game Music, Inc., co-founder of Space Whale Studios, and one of the founders of VGI Philly. It’s another great new year, and we’re almost at the 2010 Game Developers Conference. I thought it would be nice to talk a bit about how our first year went, why we put this organization together, and what you can expect from us this year. Woof! Well, here goes!

In March of 2009, Alex Horn, Hardik Bhatt, and I were catching their breath at the San Francisco Game Developer’s Conference. As the beer flowed, our discussion moved into the terrain of Philadelphia’s lack of professional game development. As a city with the 2nd largest number of colleges on the East Coast, a top ten programming and database statistic, and a vibrant creative community, it seemed absurd to us that our city did not have a stronger game development presence.

The next day, after the beer wore off, Hardik and I started this group. We believed that the power of our city, the skills of our locals, and the sheer panache of our VGI team would be enough force to grow the video game industry in the greater Philadelphia area. And, so far, we haven’t been proven wrong. After returning from GDC, we were joined by local game professionals such as Damon Alberts, Grant Shonkwiler, Lou Tranchitella, and Tristin Hightower. We reached out to our two top game degree universities (Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania), and teamed up with Professor Frank Lee on as our academic liaison to Drexel.

Armed with data collected from several months of research, we connected with the City of Philadelphia and their supporting economic groups, coordinating with the Department of Business Attraction, City Hall, Select Greater Philadelphia, and Innovation Philadelphia. We helped connect the emerging home-grown studios with each other, introducing people from Philadelphia studios such as Burst! Online, Cipher Prime, Final Form Games, and Space Whale Studios. We’ve lectured and presented at the Philly IGDA, helping budding game developers start their own studios. We have built relationships with the local venture capital companies, and helped them find talented professionals for their projects. Finally, we helped produce the GameX Industry Summit, a 2-day industry-to-industry event held outside of Philadelphia, featuring speakers and keynotes from Ubisoft, Kaos Studios, Harmonix, and CCP.

All in all, it’s been a great first 9 months. We’re farther along than we thought we’d be. Now, however, comes the tough slog. We have been pushing for video game incentives that are equivalent to Michigan’s and Georgia’s. That’s a tough, long process, as most of the Pennsylvania state government is focused on upcoming elections. We’ve been fortunate to have interest from several state senators and representatives in our initiative, but we need to continue to follow through with our push to make Pennsylvania a game-company friendly state.

Also, now that we have great studios in the area, we are committed to start promoting and advertising them. We are lucky that several great journalism sites (including Joystiq, Technically Philly, and Geekadelphia) are behind us, and they will be helping us broadcast all the great games that our studios will be putting out. We are also planning on creating “behind the scenes” posts and articles, where you get to learn more about the studios that have set up shop here, who they are, and how they are building their first set of titles.

So, keep track of us through our RSS feed and by checking on our website. We guarantee there’s going to be some great stuff happening in the Philadelphia Video Game Community this year, and VGI wants to help make it happen!

Here’s to a great 2010,

Mike Worth
Co-Founder, VGI Philadelphia