One of the interesting Nordic Game 2009 sessions was titled “The Global Game Jam: Nordic Beginnings” (Led by Gorm Lai, Game Jam (DK)).

On this session Gorm Lai, co-founder of Nordic and Global Game Jams, was introducing the movement and some of the projects risen from the workshop weekends. One of the many interesting Game Jam projects included The Dark Room Sex Game from Nordic Game Jam 2008. The same game was also on display and free to try on the expo area of Nordic Game 2009 . The theme of 2008 Nordic Game Jam was “Taboo” and it is safe to say that this particular game succeeded in this goal. Nobody volunteered to play with Dajana Dimovska in the middle of the session 😉 (maybe it was just the Nordic shyness). Another interesting project presented at the session was  Love Child. Love Child is a game, where you are playing parents manipulating the genes of a child to get the best possible combination.

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It is one thing to make a game for a big screen. It is completely another case re-creating the same game world using a small handheld device.

Ian Bowden from Rockstar Leeds talked at the Nordic Game conference about what kind of challenges they encountered while developing the Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on Nintendo DS. Chinatown Wars is the first GTA game for DS, and it is based in the world of GTA IV. You would think there is not much innovation in developing the twelfth sequel for a well-known game series. Surely, they had an established concept; they even had an already created city environment. However, as we heard at the Nordic Game, it takes much creativity and a bunch of innovative decisions to take a big-scale game and to convert it to a small screen and other limits of a handheld device.

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