Described as “the rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Inc magazine and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, Kurzweil is uniquely positioned to speak to the GDC audience about the next two decades of videogames and what the landscape may well look like come GDC 2028.
GDC, an industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, returns to the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for a week of networking, learning, and inspiration February 18 through 22, 2008. Complete details and registration for the conference are available now at
www.gdconf.com.
"Bringing the future to life today has always been at the heart of the game industry, so it's essential to have our vision refreshed by one of our greatest living thinkers," says Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. "As a technology inventor and prophetic visionary, Ray Kurzweil is that rare individual who can inspire the next evolutionary step forward in what games can do."
Ray Kurzweil has been recognized as an intellectual pioneer by some of the most respected American media sources. He was described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included him as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
The keynote, “The Next 20 Years of Gaming,” is scheduled for February 21, 2008, from 10:30am to 11:30am PST in the Esplanade Room of the Moscone Center’s South Hall.
GDC 2008 will also feature sessions on breakthrough titles such as Bioshock, Crysis, Halo 3, Rock Band, Singstar, and more, from leading members of the game development community including creator of the Magnavox Odyssey game system Ralph Baer, Microsoft/Bungie engineering lead Chris Butcher, managing director of Crytek GmbH Cervat Yerli, president and creative director of 2K Boston/Irrational Ken Levine, Richard Bates of Entropia Universe Business Development, Senior Producer at LucasArts Entertainment Haden Blackman, and many others.