GDC draws record attendance

The Game Developers Conference hit a couple milestones last week, as the San Francisco-based event celebrated its 25th annual show with a record attendance figure. Organizers of the event UBM TechWeb today announced an attendance total of 19,000 for the show, edging out last year's tally of 18,250.

While this year's GDC highlighted plenty of emerging trends in the social and mobile gaming spaces, it didn't ignore gaming's PC and console history. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata delivered the event's headlining keynote address, venerated Sega developer Yu Suzuki made his first conference appearance in the US for a career retrospective, and the creators of seminal arcade, console, and PC games delivered postmortems on their classic hits.

The event also played host to the Game Developers Choice Awards, which saw Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption take home Game of the Year honors. Mojang's Minecraft also won three categories at the show, including Best Downloadable Game. It was a big night for the PC indie hit, as it also took home the Seumas McNally Grand Prize Award at the GDCA lead-in show, the Independent Games Festival Awards.

With the 2010 show in the books, UBM TechWeb is already looking toward next year's event. The group confirmed that GDC will once again take over the Moscone Convention Center March 5-9, 2012.

For more from the show, check out GameSpot's complete coverage of the 2011 Game Developers Conference.