SAN FRANCISCO – Epic Games had a very busy Game Developers Conference (GDC 2012) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Epic hosted press sessions and met with developers and partners of its award-winning Unreal Engine technology in Business Suite 800, West Hall. In addition, Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski hosted the Game Developer Choice Awards, and a dozen senior members of Epic’s staff spoke at the conference. The man behind the company, Tim Sweeney, talks about the next Unreal Engine technology and the future of gaming in this exclusive video interview.

It’s been a pretty big week for Epic Games on the technology front. Epic Games Chief Executive Officer, Founder and Technical Director Tim Sweeney presented the company’s award-winning Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) technology running fully inside an Adobe Flash-based environment during a keynote at Adobe MAX 2011 in Los Angeles, Adobe’s annual conference for developers, designers and business leaders. Epic Games President Mike Capps took the stage in San Francisco to showcase Infinity Blade II, the sequel to Chair Entertainment’s bestselling iOS game, running on the new iPhone 4S during Apple’s press conference. That’s on top of Gears of War 3 continuing to sell at a record pace, and with the first DLC already coming in November.

For the NASCAR Nationwide Series races, Danica Patrick will drive with her current stock car team, JR Motorsports, owned by Dale Earnhardt, Jr. In the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, Danica will be with Stewart-Haas Racing, co-owned by two-time Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart and Gene Haas, founder of Haas Automation. Both series will be financially fueled by Go Daddy, her long-time sponsor who first signed the Go Daddy Girl in 2006. Patrick can be seen in Activision’s new NASCAR video game. And she also worked with the game publisher on the racing game, Blur.

Activision has a new shooter hitting Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC that just hit store shelves. The team at Raven Software has been working on Singularity, a shooter with a time-traveling twist that takes players from a near future back to the 1950s. The action is set on a Russian island called Katorga-12, where the Soviets discovered a strange new element, E-99, that they believed could end the Cold War once and for all. Long story short, the experiment is rushed and botched and the Russians rip a hole through time and space with horrible results.

Now Modern Warfare 2 gamers can play like the pros. ASTRO Gaming, creator of premium videogaming equipment for professional gamers, has launched the ASTRO A30 Cross-Gaming Headset, a professional-grade cross-gaming platform audio solution for gamers on-the-go.  The ASTRO A30 Cross-Gaming Headset features a lightweight street-smart design and delivers tournament-level audio quality and crystal-clear voice communication across all types of digital entertainment devices including gaming consoles, PCs and mobile devices.  

Full Sail University, an award-winning entertainment media institution, will host the 2010 Global Game Jam (GGJ) in Florida this weekend. The GGJ was established in 2009 as an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) event that brings together talented individuals and teams from around the globe. Participants are given a central theme, for which they have 48 hours to create a video game. The goal of the event is not to compete, but to rapidly prototype video game designs, while providing new ideas to advance the gaming industry.