Like a rock star on stage, John Carmack of Oculus (and, of course, Doom fame) was surrounded in the lobby of the Loews Hotel in Los Angeles as attendees were arriving for the first Oculus Connect conference. Had the chance to speak with the man regarding GPU developments, Nvidia, PC rendering, and Epic’s role in preparing UE4 to work on Samsung’s GearVR. After over an hour of fielding questions, taking photos, and signing a guy’s copy of Wolfenstein on a 3.5″ floppy for PC, he was called away. Super personable guy, with no pretension, on his game in ways that make geeks drool.

Went upstairs to finish registration and ran into Hilmar Pétursson of CCP Games, the makers of Eve Online! This is turning out to be one spectacular day. Just before heading up to the mezzanine, I ran into Aaron Davies of Oculus (Director of Developer Relations), who promised to be at my meeting on Saturday to demonstrate our work in progress on Timefire.

The swag bag is kinda empty; a t-shirt is in there, but not an Oculus Next-Gen 4k Rift, or a free GTX 980, or a GearVR – though I’m holding out that some kind of magic is in the air, and we will see something to satisfy everyone’s sense of greed. Hell, I’d be happy with half a dozen bobbleheads in the likeness of Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell, Michael Antonov, and John Carmack.