soft o·pen·ing noun /sɔft, sɒft ˈoʊpənɪŋ/ not hard or stiff act or instance of making or becoming open.

But in the ETC culture, soft opening is a gathering of enthusiastic students and amazing play-testers joining each other in celebration of Free Food™. We eat, play, talk and share ideas about games, our games, their games, and everything else that is not games. That is exactly what happened just this past week, on Friday, April 22.

As you’re aware, we have four amazing teams hosted here in ETC-SV this semester (and though god has made them all equal, one team is more equal than the rest!) Each team had a booth set up in the main atrium here at Electronic Arts, and that’s where they lured the foot traffic to test whatever they had made and give the team otherworldly feedback. For some this meant handing phones and tablets, while others would ask people to sit at PCs or stand in front of a giant TV with a security camera pointed at their nose. However, this whole day wasn’t completely void of interesting encounters.

Paulwei’s gang (or team Puppetineering; now which do you prefer?!) made contact with a group of tiny, cute and cuddly kids, which seemed to enjoy dancing along Super Quasi to a Michael Jackson hit. The most awesome team of all time, Blue Dot, also made an interesting attempt at collecting play-testers’ business cards by offering them “a batch of cupcakes;” a technique that led to an unprecedented increase in both quantity and quality of the feedback they received. As for Empyrean 2D and Ethereal, one is making an awesome medieval combat game with cool graphics and breathtaking tech behind the scenes, and the other is Ethereal.

A complete success, as always; though no one knows what the future might bring. There might come a time when soft opening at ETC-SV is still a success, but students write up astonishingly unprofessional blog posts about it. Well, we’re good for now at least :)

The music in the video is courtesy of Northbound, more info here.