A little bit of conference history then, to combine legend with fact, from an “old timer” involved in both conference traditions:

the first DAC conference was initiated by Espen Aarseth in Bergen in 1998. Already then, game papers were on the programme as DAC was at that time the only venue (at least in Europe) at which games research could be presented. The DAC 1999 and 2000 also had games papers, and then come 2001, Jesper Juul and I (then both employed as ph.d. students at the IT University) felt that there were an even bigger need and now opportunity for perhaps a more specific (European) conference about games and related topics, so this year (same year as DAC was held in Providence, US) at the IT University in Copenhagen we held a conference called “Computer Games and Digital Textualities”, attracting around 150 people, a then huge and unsuspected number of people including many, if not all, of the European and Nordic games scholars that had met at the DAC conferences (and of course also Espen Aarseth was also involved in this conference).

Following the huge success, the conference took on a life of its own: next year it was hosted by the Hypermedia people in Tampere, titled “Computer Games & Digital Cultures”, or simply CGDC. It was from this conference, the DIGRA association sprang and with it the “Level Up” conference in the NEtherlands in 2003 – the first pure games conference (without an appendix of text or culture in the end;)). And the rest as they say, is history. However, it is true that from the beginning there was a close connection between DAC and DIGRA.