The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking. The event comprises an expo, networking events, awards shows such as the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards, 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. Originally called the Computer Game Developers Conference, the first conference was organized in 1988 by Chris Crawford in his San Jose, California-area living room.

About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don Daglow, Brenda Laurel, Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Tim Brengle, Cliff Johnson, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a Holiday Inn at Milpitas, attracted about 150 developers. Ernest W.

Adams was Director from 1991 to 1995, and under his leadership conferences moved between facilities in Santa Clara, San Jose and Long Beach, growing steadily in popularity, and changing from a small, undercapitalized company with previous financial losses into a profitable million-dollar business. Attendance in this period grew from 525 to 2387. By 1994 the CGDC could afford to sponsor the creation of the Computer Game Developers Association with Adams as its founding director.

In 2005, the GDC moved to the new Moscone Center West, in the heart of San Francisco's SOMA district, and reported over 12,000 attendees. The GDC returned to San Jose in 2006, reporting over 12,500 attendees, and returned to San Francisco in 2007 – where the organizers expect it will stay for the foreseeable future. Attendance figures continued to rise in following years with 18,000 people attending the 2008 event.

The 2009 Game Developers Conference was held in San Francisco, on March 23-27, 2009. The IGDA awarded 25 scholarships to send qualified students to attend the 2009 GDC. Crawford continued to give the conference keynote address for the first several years of the conference, including the famous "whip" speech in the early 1990s where he punctuated a point about game tuning and player involvement by cracking a bullwhip perilously close to the front row of the audience.

Crawford also founded The Journal of Computer Game Design in 1987 in parallel to beginning the GDC, and served as publisher and editor of the academic-style journal through 1996.

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