SAN FRANCISCO, CA–As this year’s premier Game Designers Conference was about to open this morning, organizers realized that the doors for Moscone Center were locked and nobody had a key. Eager show attendees numbering in the thousands were gathered outside the hall, impatient to begin their annual binge of wallowing in game announcements, sleeping through development tutorial sessions, packing into keynote speeches like sardines and crawling drunkenly through the streets of San Francisco in search of a place to piss. But as the official opening time passed and the doors remained shut, unrest began to spread through the crowd.

“We knew that we had a potential panic or riot on our hands,” said show organizer acquaintance and game fan, Emile Longuadoc. “My buddy, who was in charge of the doors, had to race home to get a spare set of keys.”

While that unfortunate employee braved the morning commuter traffic to San Bruno and back, attendees began chanting anti-GDC slogans while some climbed lamp posts and then slid back down to the sidewalks. Before long, the panic had set in. Rumors rippled through the crowd that keynote speaker Sid Meier had a sore throat that was delaying the show’s opening. Frightened organizers tried to calm the masses by tossing complimentary lanyards into the throng, but this had an unforeseen and unfortunate effect as many people mistook the lanyards falling from the sky as a plague of snakes.

“I was attacked by one of them,” insisted an attendee from Atlanta. “The little metal clip bit me on the nose and I had to wrestle it off and kill it.”

Before long, thousands had broken away from Moscone Center and soon raging mobs were spreading throughout the city. Reports of looting, pillaging, and public mischief flooded into local police precincts. A representative on hand from the ESRB gave the scene an unofficial rating of Mature, calling it the worst animated violence he’d seen in months.

Fortunately, the unidentified employee returned from San Bruno with the door keys just minutes before a mob was ready to sacrifice a goat on the convention hall’s steps. No further reports of disquiet have been heard.