Fallout, Gauntlet retrospective at GDC

One of the highlights of last year's annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was the Classic Games Postmortem panel, a series of discussions that look back at some of gaming history's most influential titles, presented by the developers and creators who made them possible.

This year's GDC--taking place March 5-9 in San Francisco--will play host to yet another Classic Games Postmortem series of talks, which are back by popular demand. This time the series will celebrate the original editions of four titles that have seen a series of sequels and reimaginings over the years: Alone in the Dark, Fallout, Gauntlet, and Harvest Moon.

Alone in the Dark's original designer Frederick Raynal will talk about Infogrames' atmospheric 1992 action adventure title, revealing how the game established many of the conventions that would later dominate the survival horror genre, including a fixed third-person camera angle, claustrophobic areas, revealing stories through expository items, and giving players limited ammunition.

The original Fallout's producer, lead programmer and designer Tim Cain, will speak on the game's postapocalyptic open world, its distinctive characters, moral dilemmas, and quests, and he will touch on how the series came to set a standard for open-world role-playing games.

Ed Logg, designer of Gauntlet and assistant designer on games including Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede and Millipede, will share his thoughts on creating Atari's 1985 title that paved the way for class-dependent experiences like World of Warcraft and pioneered the co-op dungeon experience.

Finally, Yasuhiro Wada will discuss the original 1996 Super Nintendo title Harvest Moon in his role as the game's producer, assistant designer, and assistant director, speaking on the ideas that gave birth to the series, its successes and failures, and an insight into the growth of the Harvest Moon business, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide in the past 15 years.

GDC 2012 will take place March 5-9 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.