Hungry for Gaming? Have a Slice of Gamer Pie
Last week MADFINGER Games joined hundreds of enthusiasts at Gamer Pie’s annual celebration of gaming. Here’s a snapshot of the event…
It was quiet up in the Skyroom, and Simona was busy blasting giant snails up into the air with a firehose. When she was done with that, she moved onto manhandling a grizzly bear, pulling its jaw grotesquely out of shape. Meanwhile, another of my teammates, Matej, was building himself an assault rifle in a pagoda set atop a snow-capped mountain range.
The Skyroom is the topmost suite of the Impact Hub Brno, where Gamer Pie held their third games festival. It was a peaceful location for MADFINGER to demonstrate their VR modelling kit, MONZO VR, alongside some other virtual reality games like Sos Sosowski’s Mosh Pit Simulator.
As one of the main sponsors of the event, MADFINGER Games was a big presence. On the ground floor we had the MFG Arena, hosting a full day’s worth of talks on a wide range of topics, from the history of gaming to sex in virtual worlds. MFG’s own Petr “Xnapy” Jirák gave a wide-ranging presentation about his specialist subject, esports.
I took over from Matej on the gun-construction front. It was my first encounter with VR, and I was dismayed to find that, having removed my glasses to put on the headset, I took my short-sightedness into the game with me. I could barely see the parts of the gun that I was trying to manipulate onto the weapon’s chassis with my glowing blue virtual hands, but I got the idea. It was surprisingly addictive and very, very relaxing.
Gamer Pie was awash with a sense of tranquillity. The bright airy interior of the Impact Hub served as a healthy conduit for the positive energy in attendance. There are lots of indoor plants, pale wood surfaces, and the occasional hipsterish touch like hay bales for seating, all creating a welcoming, chilled out atmosphere.
Likewise, the gathering was mostly young, inquisitive and calm. Since this was a gaming crowd, the palette for their clothing was mostly black — lots of game logos on T-shirts, plenty of humorous slogans, like “I 𑛉 Pixels” and “Blow Me” (under a picture of an NES cartridge).
When the speakers took the stage, they took their seats in an orderly manner, and when the speakers were finished, they formed an orderly queue at the bar for tempeh sandwiches and bottles of Club-Mate. Nobody was shouting or swinging from the light fixtures.
Apart from MADFINGER Games, there were some other big names in the Czech gaming industry in attendance. Bohemia Interactive sponsored the other main hall for talks. Amanita demonstrated their latest work of art, Creaks. Beyond that, I was intrigued by the efforts of the smaller indie developers and one-man-bands, dotted around the workspace on various screens, with wacky titles like Pope Builder in Hell, Furry Love: Under Skin of Rabbits, and Gods Must be Hungry.
The beauty of Gamer Pie is that it is still boutique enough to have some really in-depth talks on niche topics. František Fuka, famed as one of Czechoslovakia’s first game developers, gave a very detailed insight into the process of making music for video games in the 80s. DVA, the Czech alternative rock band, gave an entertaining demonstration of how they created the quirky soundtrack for Amanita’s Chuchel, featuring a Soviet-era synthesizer that produced sounds that couldn’t be replicated. Bára Kratochvílová also did some live action dubbing in the game’s invented language, which went down well with the crowd.
In the afternoon I finally gave into temptation and headed to the Retro Room, a treasure trove of old PCs and consoles. There was even a rare Nintendo Virtual Boy, which thrusts the player into a nightmarish red-and-black environment that causes bleeding from the eyes after five minutes’ play. Then there was the robotic Foosball table, which knocked goals past me with such eerie precision that I began to suspect it was sentient.
There are times when I feel my age working for MFG. I’m one of the elder statesmen in the team, so of course my younger colleagues all take the piss because I don’t know how to do a smiley emote on the keyboard, or know which “Meme” they’re referring to this week. So the Retro Room was a safe haven for an old school gamer like me, a place where I get to laugh at a couple of 15-year-old girls struggling to get through the first level of Doom 2 — gamers these days are such wimps! Back in my day…
