Last week was GDC 2026, but we’re not done with GDC just yet. Today, we’re opening a new collection of talk recordings from the 1989 Computer Game Developers’ Conference!
You read that right: 1989! We’ve digitized almost every lecture from the third ever GDC event, held in May 1989 at the Sunnyvale Hilton Hotel. It’s exciting that these tapes survived at all, but the state of the computer game industry in 1989 makes these even more interesting.
At this point in its history, the American computer game development community was fairly tight-knit. We’ve heard estimates that CGDC 1989 had around only 300 attendees, many of whom knew each other already. If you listen closely to these tapes, you’ll hear speakers call on individual audience members by name!
While it might’ve been a small event, it was impactful. Looking at the list of speakers, CGDC 1989 was stacked with developers and publishers who have gone on to become early luminaries of the industry. These tapes might be some of the earliest surviving recordings of developers like Danielle Bunten Berry, Bing Gordon, Chris Crawford, Richard Garriott, Steve Cartwright, and more.
Here’s a few of our favorite talks from this new collection:
The Golden Days of Computer Games: This panel has a remarkable lineup of game developers talking about the “good old days”… by which they mean 1980. Yes, there was already nostalgia in 1989, for a time when developers had to package their own games in Ziploc bags and nobody knew this would actually become a major industry.
Speakers: Dani Bunten, Steve Cartwright, Chris Crawford, Jon Freeman, and Richard Garriott
Movies and Games: Living with a License: Three game producers chat about the challenges and opportunities of working with licensed properties. Listen to this one if you want to learn all about the making of the Three Stooges computer game. Stick around for some industry gossip about tumultuous licensed projects that the audience was apparently already aware of, like the Barbie game for Commodore 64.
Speakers: Steve Cartwright, Elaine Ditton, Noah Falstein, and Eric Goldberg
The Press and Games: Here’s an interesting combination: An editor at Computer Gaming World and the public relations manager of Accolade talk together about the relationship between publishers and the press. Developers were thinking about this all the way back in 1989!
Speakers: Johnny Wilson and Charlotte Taylor-Skeel
Interactive Storytelling: This panel from Dave Albert at Electronic Arts starts with a lecture about storytelling… then quickly gives way to a Socratic-style conversation with the audience.
You might be able to pick out some names in the crowd: For instance, at one point Albert opens a conversation with “Brenda,” who we assume was Brenda Laurel. But depending on who was there, it also could have been Brenda (Garno) Romero!
Speaker: Dave Albert
The Publishers’ Panel: Major American computer game executives talk about the industry from their perspective, with a special focus on what they called “the slump” in the US computer game market.
This was the last panel of CGDC 1989, and it sounds like they were prepared for it to be a contentious one. And it was! You’ll get to hear a fiery Trip Hawkins explain how much he disliked Nintendo’s closed ecosystem practices, and how, in his words, “The [NES] is not gonna go on forever.”
Speakers: Gary Carlston, Bruce Davis, Peter Doctorow, Robert Garriott, Trip Hawkins, and Joe Miller
We believe this collection is only missing two talks from CGDC 1989, though it’s not clear if they were recorded:
- Strategy Games, with Roger Keating and Ian Trout
- Aristotle for Nerds, with Brenda Laurel
There were also 22 roundtable discussions—including one with counterculture icon Timothy Leary!—which we don’t believe were recorded. Until any of those tapes show up, this is as good as you’ll get to being in the audience at the Sunnyvale Hilton with 300 game designers breaking ground on their craft.
Cataloging this collection was made possible with help from the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries, which shared a copy of the CGDC 1989 program from the Steve Meretzky papers in their collections for us to reference.
Thanks to the Game Developers Conference for allowing us to share these recordings with you—and special thanks to GDC co-founder Tim Brengle, who told us at the event this year that he manually dubbed these tapes himself! We’re 37 years late on this one, but thanks a bunch, Tim.
These recordings are available for free as part of our growing digital library of video game history research materials. Projects like these depend on your support to make possible; we even invested in some new audio digitization equipment for this project, which we’ll continue to use in the future!