On the evening of May 2nd we’re staging an extra-special GameCityNights gig looking back over the career of Ian Livingstone with the man himself in attendance. I’ve interviewed Ian a number of times over the last few years for a few different projects and he’s always an entertaining, candid interviewee – I think this is going to be a fun and interesting night. Hope you can make it!

VisionSoundMusic is a new festival which was originally pitched to me as a ‘festival of sync’ed music’ some months ago by Andrew, and it’s a brilliant concept. ‘Sync’ed music’ didn’t make it into the final marketing copy (quite rightly) so now it’s the UK’s ‘first festival of music for visuals’.

Andrew has assembled an amazing programme for the first year, for which I’ve been contributing to the videogame part. Now, ‘amazing’ is an adjective that gets thrown around a lot in these parts (especially in the forthcoming frenzy of press releases we’re drafting) – but in this case it’s really deserving.

Daniel Pemberton, Nitin Sawnhey, OK GO!, Scorsese and Carpenter interviews, Richard O’Brien (?!), Richard Jacques… It’s a genuinely brilliant line-up – (and don’t forget there’s a a brilliant SoundCloud ‘audio-ad- remix’ on the site too..) and I really hope you can make it.

Early-bird tickets are now available for the whole event and we’ve just published details of how to get them over at GCHQ.

Hope we see you there!

Back next Thursday then for another instalment of GameCityNights, which this month features the amazing Chris O’Shea who does this…

Little Magic Stories from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

And this…

Air Guitar prototype with Kinect from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

..as well as lots of other brilliant stuff.

Dr Sketchy’s are also going to be there – it’s shaping up to be a good one.

See you there?

Following the comment thread responses is illuminating, highlighting the emotional weight that this subject holds for (some) people and the nuance we need to express rather better than we are now in order to navigate this investment.

We just found out we’re going to be doing a version of this at Develop in July, which should provide a particularly interesting context to deliver the ‘dead games’ message.

Professor James Newman, Bath Spa University, chairs a discussion on the role of music in video games: its evolution from the Commodore 64 era to the present day and its impact on popular culture. The panelists, including composers andJames Hannigan and Richard Jacques, also explore how old video game systems have been repurposed to create music. The event features an interactive music demonstration.

Tickets and details here!

I think Jonathan is brilliant, having first met him when I approached him to talk about the first LEGO Star Wars project at NTI* back in 2005. At the time LSW was still a gamble, the LEGO format being something that people had only really seen through the beautiful animation previews and not yet the game itself. Seven years on and at least two buy-outs later, Giant Entertainment as it was then is now part of a global megacorp and churning out LEGO franchise titles with a surprising regularity. More surprising than that for me, is that TT are managing to buck an expected trend of diminishing quality. They’re not just putting out projects to a template, but tangibly evolving it with each iteration (mostly, anyway….).

Jonathan is one of the festival’s best friends and a brilliant speaker.

You should come along if you can make it.

Details and Tickets are here!

On Wednesday 27th April, Jimmy and I are part-reprising the National Archive talk at the Institute of Engineering and Technology lecture series.

There’s refreshments (?!) from 6.30 and the show starts at 7. You’d be most welcome and can book free seats here.

As if that weren’t enough, next Thursday 28th Season 2 Episode 4 of GameCityNights crashes into Antenna, welcoming Stewart Gilray of Just Add Water and Lorne Lanning live from his Berkeley retreat. It’s all about Oddworld and it’s going to be lovely to hear from big Lorne again.

Find out more and get tickets at nights.gamecity.org – show starts around 6…

Sadly, they left the name of our talk from the description on the site, but ‘All Things Must Pass…’ is shaping up to be fun…

March 27th

Jakub Dvorsky @ GameCityNights

Jakub (Samarost / Machinarium/ Kooky) Dvorsky is one the most humble and generous speakers we’ve ever had to the festival, so it’s great he’s coming back over to do our March GCNights gig. He’s going to be talking about his studio, Amanita, his ‘other’ work art-directing the movie Kooky and announcing not one but TWO of his new projects.

James Newman and I are doing a couple of talks in April, which it would be lovely to see you at – mostly talking about digital preservation and the NVA. We’re testing out some new ideas at the National Archives talk, which will form the basis of much of our up coming work in this area and hopefully should start to move the discussion forward at least a little.

Institute of Engineers

27th April,

Newton Building, Nottingham Trent University

18:30 Reception,

19:00 Lecture

The National Archives talk will be open to the public, and takes place on April 14th. Details to follow….

I’m really excited about this as not only is he showing Amanita’s TWO new projects for the first time ever, but he’s also going to be talking about the work he’s done as art director on this…

Kooky, like all Jakub’s work, looks amazing.