The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
1997 saw many sequels and prequels in video games, such as Final Fantasy VII, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Quake II, Mega Man Legends, Riven, Tomb Raider II, Dark Rift, Tekken 3 and Virtua Striker 2, along with new titles such as Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Gran Turismo, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout.
ACMI, formerly the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, is Australia's national museum of screen culture including film, television, videogames, digital culture and art. ACMI was established in 2002 and is based at Federation Square in Melbourne, Victoria.
PAX is a series of gaming culture festivals involving tabletop, arcade, and video gaming. PAX is held annually in Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, and Melbourne. Previously, it was also held in San Antonio.
Marcus Westbury OAM is an Australian urbanist, festival director, TV presenter, writer and broadcaster. He is based in Melbourne, Australia where he filmed the TV series Not Quite Art. for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation screened during October–November 2007.
Melbourne International Arts Festival, formerly Spoleto Festival Melbourne – Festival of the Three Worlds, then Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, becoming commonly known as Melbourne Festival, was a major international arts festival held in Melbourne, Australia, from 1986 to 2019. It was to be superseded by a new festival called Rising from 2020.
Next Wave is a biennial festival based in Melbourne, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Next Wave encourages interdisciplinary practice and fosters the creation and presentation of works by emerging artists working across a broad range of art forms, including dance, theatre, visual arts, performance, new media, and literature.
IndieCade is an international juried festival of independent games. Game types include video games, live-action games, and tabletop games. Independent game developers are selected to demo, screen, and promote their work at the annual IndieCade festival and showcase events. IndieCade also includes a conference track featuring classes, panels, workshops, and keynotes. Since 2020, the annual festival has taken place online under the name IndieCade Anywhere & Everywhere.
Karen Jacobsen is an Australian-born New York-based entertainer, singer, motivational speaker, voiceover artist, and songwriter.
Stickets is a 2013 tile-matching game developed and published by the Australian indie studio Wanderlands and released on May 30, 2013, for iOS. The game had won the Freeplay Independent Games Festival for Best Australian Game.
Matt Scholten is an Australian theatre and film director, producer, writer and teacher. He is the Artistic Director & Creative Producer of independent theatre company If Theatre which was established in 2006.
AFL Women's (AFLW) is Australia's national semi-professional Australian rules football league for female players. The first season of the league in February and March 2017 had eight teams; the league expanded to 10 teams in the 2019 season, 14 teams in 2020 and 18 teams in 2022. The league is run by the Australian Football League (AFL) and is contested by each of the clubs from that competition. The reigning premiers are the Brisbane Lions.
Melbourne International Games Week is the largest game professional and consumer communication and networking platform in Asia Pacific, hosted by Creative Victoria. It comprises a confluence of events for three areas of interest, business, consumer and industry.
Julia Jacklin is an Australian singer-songwriter from the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales. Jacklin's musical style has been described as indie pop, indie folk, and alternative country. She has released three studio albums, Don't Let the Kids Win (2016), Crushing (2019) and Pre Pleasure (2022). Jacklin has also performed with the band Phantastic Ferniture, with whom she released the debut single "Fuckin 'n' Rollin" and a self-titled album in 2018, followed by subsequent singles.
Majok Maker Majok is a South Sudanese-Australian professional basketball player for the South East Melbourne Phoenix of the National Basketball League (NBL). He played college basketball for the Ball State Cardinals for two years, leading the Mid-American Conference (MAC) in rebounding and earning third-team all-conference honors in both seasons. He is a three-time NBL champion, winning in 2018 with Melbourne United, 2020 with the Perth Wildcats, and 2024 with the Tasmania JackJumpers.
Daniel "Dan" Golding is an Australian writer, composer, broadcaster, and academic.
The Melbourne Queer Games Festival is an annual LGBT game festival held in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It was founded in 2018 and is held in October as a part of the Melbourne International Games Week. It showcases video and tabletop games from around the world that feature LGBT gameplay elements
The Catacombs of Solaris is a 2016 video game by Australian independent developer Ian MacLarty. Described as a "maze that plays with your perception of 3D space on a 2D screen", Catacombs is an art game that exploits the use of perspective to create an illusion of space. Praised for its experimental approach to perception and space, the game won the Freeplay Award at the 2018 Freeplay Independent Games Festival, and was showcased in several art and festival exhibits including by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. In 2021, a revised version of the game with additional features titled The Catacombs of Solaris Revisited was published by the developer.
Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown is a digital tabletop game developed and published by Tin Man Games. It was initially released as a virtual reality game for PlayStation VR, but it was later ported to Windows, which optionally uses VR, and Switch, which does not. It simulates tabletop role-playing board games.
