This week, I’m heading way across the Atlantic to Cannes, France, to attend the IDEF 2009 expo. I’ve never been, but I’ve been told it’s a pretty important business-to-business trade fair for the European market. And well, you know, it’s in Cannes — which is not exactly terrible place to have to visit! My travel schedule is fairly grueling — it’s pretty much go, go, go from the moment I step on the plane today, but I have no doubt it’s also going to be awesome experience, work-wise and personally, since I’ve never been to the south of France at all.

With luck, I’ll have the time and energy to be able to post some interesting updates, if not my personal Twitter feed or the Naughty Dog Twitter feed can help you live vicariously, especially the jet lagged parts.

See you on the beach!
(I’m cruel, aren’t I?)

Every following year I have found myself busier and busier at the conference and this year is no exception. Between work, attending sessions, having meetings and attending various get together events of varied sizes, scopes and importance, I’m going to be hard pressed to find a time to relax a little or even sleep. This is making the rest of this week look awesome and terrible simulatneously. But no matter what, it’s going to be a worthwhile experience for me and for everything I do these days, especially since I’ve joined Naughty Dog.

Keep an eye out on my Twitter or the Naughty dog Twitter to see what I’m up to at any given moment. In a slightly longer, and less immediate, format, you can check out this blog and NaughtyDog.com for updates throughout GDC09 as well.

If you’re at GDC, drop my a line through the many ways you can contact me and feel free to add me as a friend on myGDC if you’re on there.

I’ve taken the liberty of copying my schedule for the below… even though I have a couple of conflicts yet to be resolved, looks like it’s going to be quite the full week at the conference!

Hope to see some of you there. Hope I survive the week…

Photo courtesy of the Game Developers Conference

If you haven’t checked on the interwebs yesterday or just happen to live under a rock and only read my blog via satellite beams to your tinfoil hat, then you just might have missed that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was revealed.

Well, the fact it exists, the title, some details from a future article, a magazine cover and a video have been revealed. So basically not very much has yet been revealed, which means the next twelve months are going to be awesomely busy for me.

Yep, this is the game I’ve been working on since I joined Naughty Dog in June 2008. It’s actually pretty exciting that the news is finally out and it’s a relief I don’t have to be all coy and secretive about it. Although not much else can be said for now. You’ll just have to wait and see for the Spike VGA awards on December 14 to be aired to see our world premiere trailer and then for the January 2009 issue of Game Informer to hit subscribers and newsstands in mid-December to learn more about the game.

Otherwise you won’t hear a peep from me.

In the meantime, here’s what you can check out so far.

- I’ve written a blog post for PlayStation.blog that talks about all of yesterday’s activities
- Game Informer posted the cover image and details of their January 2009 issue
- GameTrailers posted a promo advertisement we made for the 2008 VGA Awards on Spike (SD | HD)
- I noticed that someone made a Wikipedia page for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

You can view all of the coverage, as I find it by my own hand, across the Web on Naughty Dog’s delicious page under the “uncharted2″ tag.

If you’re really lazy, I’ve also embedded the VGA promo spot we made below.

Last night IGN put up a story about how Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune would get a patch to add Trophy support “very, very soon.” Which it is. In the piece there is a short video that shows Trophies in action in Uncharted (below). Along with that there’s a brief interview with a Naughty Dog rep, Arne Meyer, about the Trophy paaa…

Oh wait. Yeah, that’s me.

Guess now it’s “official.” Even though it’s just words on a screen, this feels as awkward as watching yourself on video or listening to a recording of yourself — I still have nightmares about my totally stellar (not) podcast spot with the G-Pinions guys. Thankfully I manage not to sound like a fool, so there might be more where these come from. Now, time to cease the auto-critique…

E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!