Our GamesBeat Summit 2019 event kicks off today at the Two-Bit Circus micro-amusement park in Downtown Los Angeles. We’ve got 97 speakers over two days — so many good talks, in fact, that we’re broadcasting live from two stages this year.
We start streaming from our two stages — Boss and Hero. The action starts on the Hero stage at 12:45 p.m. with opening remarks from our co-emcees, Andrea Rene and Tommy Tallarico. Tallarico is bringing back the Intellivision with Intellivision Lives, and he’s the founder of Video Games Live (an orchestral spectacular that celebrates video game music). Rene, a longtime member of the media, is coming back in her second year of hosting our events and is a founder of the “What’s Good Games” show.
Our Boss Stage program kicks off at 12:50 p.m. with opening remarks from GamesBeat lead writer and Summit organizer Dean Takahashi. Our Boss stage co-emcees are Elizabeth Howard and Ted Staloch, both executives at Aspyr.
Be a boss
Day 1 features some of gaming’s biggest names streaming from our YouTube page.
Google VP Phil Harrison will hit the Boss Stage at 1:10 p.m. Pacific for “The Future of Gaming” with Amy Hennig from our Boss Stage. Last we heard from Harrison, he was showing off Google Stadia and its cloud-based gaming platform at the Game Developers Conference 2019 last month. Hennig is looking for her next big project — she was going to make a story-driven Star Wars game at EA, but the publisher canceled that project and shut down Visceral Games. Hennig kicked off the Uncharted series, one of the powerhouses of the Sony stable.
Ted Price takes the Boss Stage at 1:50 p.m. Pacific for a chat on “Crafting Culture, Creating Vision” with Morgan Webb of Bonfire Studios. Price’s Insomniac Games had one of the biggest hits — commercial and critical — with Marvel’s Spider-Man, and the studio has been making excellent games (such as the Ratchet & Clank series) for 25 years. Webb made her start on one of video games’ beloved TV shows, G4 TV’s “X-Play.” She started in games and tech media in 2001 and now works at Bonfire Studios, which ex-World of Warcraft lead designer Rob Pardo (another of our speakers) founded in 2016.
And I’m excited to hear from Vince Zampella of Respawn Studios in our “Chasing the Fun” chat with Price at 4:50 p.m. Pacific. Just days ago, Zampella showed off Jedi: Fallen Order at Star Wars Celebration. It wowed us and hundreds of thousands of others, telling a tale of a Jedi who survives the destruction of the Jedi from Darth Sidious’s Order 66. And his studio launched one of the biggest games of the first quarter of the year — the battle royale Apex Legends.
You can catch these talks and more from our Boss Stage feed on YouTube and Facebook.
Be a hero
Our second stage, Hero, is streaming on our Twitch page.
Here, we’ve got Bonfire Studios’ Rob Pardo talking about “Building a Culture that Lasts” with Morgan Webb at 3:40 p.m. Pacific. Pardo was the lead designer for World of Warcraft and a past chief creative officer at Blizzard Entertainment. He founded Bonfire Studios in 2016, though they haven’t revealed what they’re working on yet.
We’ve also got Rami Ismail talking about “Games as a Global Language” with GameLab conference boss Ivan Lobo. Ismail is a cofounder of Vlambeer, a thriving indie game studio. He’s also made it a priority to promote indie gaming and diversity in the industry, and he’s frequently one of the best speakers on any event slate he appears in.
