The Game Developers Conference returned to San Francisco this year with attendance back at pre-pandemic levels, and hundreds of exhibits lining the underground halls of the Moscone Center.
As players lined up to try the latest VR demos from big sponsors including Meta and PlayStation, one of them summed up a major theme of the show: “We’re building games that interact with our actual world.”
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, players could only enter the virtual worlds of video games through a handheld controller and a living room TV.
“It was the golden age,” quipped a developer playing Super Mario World on a Super Nintendo at the conference.