1UP: Overheard At The DICE Summit...

Videogame industry gatherings serve many purposes -- displaying new projects, sharing new techniques, networking in hopes of future opportunities -- but there's one thing industry types seem to enjoy above all else, which is gossip. The games business is small enough to be one big sewing circle, around which news travels precipitously fast. It travels even faster at an event like this weekend's DICE Summit, wherein many and varied personages gathered to do all of the above (but mostly talk about each other behind assorted backs).

Our correspondents at the summit heard and saw plenty, so we though we'd pass on some of the more interesting odds and ends they shared with us. As the image above left suggests, take with salt for best results.

ITEM: Is there a Metal Gear movie in the works? This is one of the oldest chestnuts in the book, but as it happens, David Hayter -- the voice of Solid Snake and the screenwriter of record for the original X-Men movie -- was reportedly talking up the prospect of a Metal Gear flick with Universal Studios in more certain terms than usual.

ITEM: Epic Games level designer Cliff Bleszinski has some very strange wallpaper images on his cellular phone.

ITEM: Jason Rubin is the public face of Jak & Daxter developer Naughty Dog, but will he be for very much longer? Rubin managed to raise a fair amount of buzz with a short, sharp, and witty presentation about "how developers need to stop being slaves to publishers," as one attendee described it. Which is a strange attitude to hear from the head of a development studio wholly owned by Sony. Rubin also mentioned that he may be working in Hollywood in some fashion soon...

ITEM: Congratulations, Raymond. Where are you registered?

ITEM: While Ubisoft brought Jordan Mechner, designer of the original game, to assist with the development of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, he may not have as much involvement in the already-announced sequel. Working on the script for the Prince of Persia movie will apparently occupy much of his time in the near future.

ITEM: Read into it what you will, but one development source described the next PlayStation and the next Xbox as "scarily similar" in terms of their technological capabilities -- they're apparently very close in terms of overall capacity. We can't confirm how much said source had had to drink, however.

ITEM: EA Games Trax may become something more than a cute graphical overlay in the Need for Speed games. In a conference session discussing the convergence of games and Hollywood, Electronic Arts "Worldwide Exective of Music" Steve Schnur said that EA is planning to announce a new way of making money off its musical efforts. Whatever it is, it's going to be something unconventional -- Schnur declared that the music business as it exists today "is dead."

ITEM: Speaking of vague hints about future consoles, some developers have reportedly visited Nintendo to talk about laying the groundwork for development on Nintendo's next console. Pending, of course, random nonsense in the Japanese press about said console possibly not existing.

ITEM: The Prince of Persia development team lost a fair amount of money at the blackjack tables, but their stack of Interactive Achievement Awards should help make up for the loss. The team walked off with a preposterous 11 awards, so there should be plenty of statuettes for every key staff member who wants one on the mantelpiece.

Expect more odds and ends from our extremely tired correspondents later this weekend.