My recent trip to Tokyo was based around the Tokyo Game Show 2003 - a place to take the pulse of the Japanese video game industry. I spent the week after in a series long trips to various game company offices, collecting photos and interviews. Then I followed up by email, amassing impressions.

I spent the first five days in Korea sifting through all of that material to make a linked-up, image-rich Event Wrap-Up: Tokyo Game Show 2003 piece for the web site of Game Developer Magazine. (You'll probably need a name and password to see the article - free to read after registration). I didn't get enough sleep and I pushed myself towards a body breakdown, but I'm proud of this article, the first commission I've had to research and write broadly about the Japanese game industry.

After the conference, I struck up conversation with a smiling foreigner in a Tokyo hotel elevator. He turned out to be Bill Swartz, someone who had been working between Japan and the USA for decades, with a strong sense of the state of the industry. A perfect, if unlikely connection. I'm finding that random interactions with friendly strangers can yield fantastic contacts for future stories.