It was our first time in Austin for SXSW and we were honored to sponsor the Gaming Expo stage, now in its second year at the massive cultural event focusing on music, movies, and interactive entertainment and technology.
With the Geek stage playing host to a number of astounding guests, including Bioware, TellTale games, NASA, Annoying Orange, Marvel Entertainment, Minecraft, FUNimation, Oculus Rift, and so many more, fans were treated to a non-stop flow of innovative technology, special sneak peeks, and exclusive giveaways all weekend.
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Here’s just a few of the things that took place on our stage this weekend:
- The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is AMAZING! It lives up to the hype and knocks down any skepticism the moment you put it on. We can’t wait to play first person shooters with this thing!
- Marvel gave everyone over 700 #1 issues for free until March 12th (although that might change as the servers were so overwhelmed with downloads that it might be extended). And Project Gamma puts responsive music into digital comics… and it’s actually really cool! We thought it could be cheesy or repetitive, but Marvel proved us wrong!
- Minecraft has ultra devoted fans as young as 3 that play the game with their families. Blew our minds!
- We’ve never heard Legend of Zelda music played so brutally until we heard Descendants of Erdrick play on our stage (twice)!
- Richard Garriott, astronaut and creator of the Ultima series of games revealed Lord British’s The Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues game. That’s a mouthful of a title, but fans of the genre should eat this new game right up.
- New lightsaber colors are getting added to Star Wars The Old Republic TODAY (Tuesday) via a major patch update. People who pre-order Rise of the Hutt Cartel get some cool in-game exclusives.
- At the Borderland panel, we learned that While Skyrim is about the world the characters inhabit, Borderlands is about the characters. Player characters will continue to become NPCs in future editions.
- With astounding visuals and a rousing score, we were a little misty-eyed when the NASA guys told us their hopes for the future of space exploration. And they also told us about the free NASA Mars rover landing game that’s available for the Xbox 360 Kinect. You should probably download that now!
- Tomb Raider game composer Jason Graves has scored over 100 games in the last 10 years!
- The Gears of War: Judgment team gave fans some insider tips on how to play your best and revealed that “Domination” is a new multiplayer mode, a capture the flag type of game. It’s an evolution of King of the Hill from GoW 3.
That’s just a few of the highlights, but there’s more to come! Do you like free stuff? Well, we walked a way with a bunch of exclusive swag that we’ll be giving away to our most devoted fans and followers in the coming weeks! Check the site every day for the latest updates, because these items won’t last long!