Naughty Dog at IDEF 2009 in Cannes, France

Just over a week ago Naughty Dog was asked to participate in the IDEF expo, held in famous Cannes, France, from June 30 - July 2. The IDEF functions as France's largest and most important trade show for buyers and distributors in the video game industry. If you pay attention to such things, this is equivalent to something like the GameStop managers show or Destination PlayStation, which help retailers and distributors decide how many units of games and hardware they'll be picking up upon release. There are also some press visits thrown in just to keep things interesting. That's where we come into the picture. Coming off of Naughty Dog's best E3 yet, where we won our first ever E3 awards, we've been constantly bombarded to show gameplay anyone and everyone who couldn't be at E3 09. For the French territory, that included distributors and retailers scheduled to tour the PlayStation booth at the IDEF during the three days of the expo. Of course, we weren't going to turn something this important down, whether or not a trip to the south of France was included! Two planes and thirteen hours later I arrived in Cannes with a precious Blu-ray in hand, containing our E3 demo code. I walked over to the Palais de Festivals to test it out on our demo station and check out our booth setup. I took some pics of the the booth to show what it looked like, including the Uncharted 2 demo station, with a nice wall-sized graphic and two of the many magazine covers we've managed to get so far. During the pre-show setup and testing, I met Nicholas and Masumi, a couple of developers from SCEE London Studio who are working on EyePet, who also made the trip to Cannes to demo their game. A little surprising was finding out that actual developers seemed like that was a rarity at the IDEF, but it felt nice to be one of the special few there. Over the next three days, some of France's biggest retailers, like FNAC, Carrefour and others came by to check out all of the PlayStation games at booths and, of course, they stopped by our booth. The show wasn't just for French retailers, as reps from the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Spain came by too. On Wednesday, the a bunch of journalists came by at various times, including Jeuxvideo.com, Gamersyde and just about every magazine and website under the Yellow Media group. On our last night there, SCEE took us out for dinner and drinks to celebrate the show. We had an amazing dinner at L'Oasis and then retreated to the Hotel Martinez, where I was told, at least, that more than one celebrity has stopped by there on occasion during the Cannes Film Festival. This was definitely an amazing trip, and I've worked a lot of events and expos in my time. Everyone I met during the whole show was amazingly nice and I look forward to seeing them again soon, if not at the next IDEF we're invited to.