News

This Wednesday, Andorra Telecom presented its ninth Video Game Show, which will take place from 16 to 18 February at the Prat del Roure in Escaldes-Engordany. This year's edition will offer visitors the opportunity to try out the latest developments on the market and also to take a closer look at the educational side of the industry with a series of concurrent activities aimed at initiating students in the career possibilities offered by a fast-growing sector.

The Show, as in the previous edition, has expanded to new locations, namely the University of Andorra, the Illa Carlemany shopping centre and cinemas  and the World Champions Museum with the aim of positioning itself as an industry showcase, drawing in new audiences and raising its profile among visitors.

Under the generic title of "Make your passion your profession", the University of Andorra (UdA) and Andorra Telecom have organized a series of 5 activities aimed at a range of different audiences. The first of these will take place in the University of Andorra itself on 15 February and will be given by lecturers of the U-Tad University Center for Technology and Digital Arts, who will be introducing vocational and university students to the world of design, programming and the career possibilities offered by video games.

Also from a more professional perspective, there will be a round table of video game development experts at the Illa Carlemany cinemas. Entitled Video games and animation: the indie world versus the professional world, it features the participation of the U-TAD, high school teacher Quim Sabaté, who has developed games with his students, and developer Jaime Domínguez from the company Kaleidogames.

Two more activities aimed at children will focus on junior video game programming and family robotics, taking place on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning in Prat del Roure and Illa Carlemany. Finally, Illa Carlemany will be hosting the workshop Have an Art Day, organized by the Carmen Thyssen Museum. The pixelated painting allows children to perceive pixels from a painter's point of view.

The partnership with the French Embassy will serve to showcase some of the most interesting games created in this country. Masseka Game Studio, an independent company based in Toulouse, will present a game for Kissoro mobile platforms, based on a thousand-year-old African game, a variant of Oware, which is of great educational interest. Zero Games Studios, a company located in the Paris region and known in the American market as Extreme Gear: Demolition Arena, from 2016, will be launching its new game Total World War, to be released for PCs, Nintendo Switch and in a mobile device version.

Other projects that can be seen in this event are Resilence Tribal Game, a strategy game for PC scheduled to launch in 2019, the work of the Parisian studio Sweet Arsenic Games Studio, and Arashi, the first project from the Smiling Crook studio, also scheduled for release next year. The four companies show the growing strength of the industry in France.

From a purely recreational perspective, the Show will have 13 zones and 93 game positions. Among the new features this year are the clear commitment to e-sports and the emphasis on virtual reality and motor simulators. The Show has two types of tournaments: on-line and face-to-face. The on-line tournaments are of the games Counter Strike: Go, FIFA 18, Call of Duty, Hearthstone and Clash Royal, which will be held in the weeks prior to the Show itself. The face-to-face sessions will be held during the Show.

The Show's presentation was given by Andorra Telecom spokesperson, Carles Casadevall, the Regional Minister of Sports and Computer Science of the Commune of Escaldes-Engordany, Jordi Vilanova, the Rress and Cultural Affairs attaché of the French Embassy in Andorra Jérôme Vinyolas; the Director of Institutional Relations of the UdA, Cristina Yañez, and the Art Director of the Carmen Thyssen Andorra Museum, Guillermo Cervera.