And High Times has this to say,
“Spain is in the vanguard of a new European revolution in pot freedom”
There’s also a forum post on that page from a tourist who claimed he paid just 4 Euro per gram for homegrown ‘dank’!
I’d be interested to hear a more official account of the legal status.
[EDIT: 04/03/2008] Oh dear lord it’s just how I imagined it to be…
Work:
In other news, Pyro in Madrid are hiring.According to their website they’ve got 125 staff and are working on PS3, Wii and XBox 360 projects…Read more about the company on MobyGames or Wikipedia.They also seem to have connections with academia [Spanish].There’s some coverage confirming that they’re working on an adventure game for Wii, to be released in 2008.One of my friends went there for an interview and had this to say:”pyro seemed coolgenerally people were nice, the interview questions actually made sense (not like completely irrelevant technical or even theoretical stuff), office seemed good, game they work on as wellthey are doingtwo titles with the unreal 3 enginethere seem to be a lot of hot girls there TBHthey offer free spanish courses toothey booked a really nice hotel for meboth actually… although the one in mallorca was more touristy, whereas the one in madrid was more business like, really nice breakfast buffet, swimming pool, whirlpool thingy in the roomquite enjoyed my stay :)”
It looks like both EA (Madrid) and Ubisoft (Barcelona) have studios in Spain, though I couldn’t find much information about current vacancies there.
Also Revistronic look like a real developer (Though not much on MobyGames and barely a mention on Wikipedia), and they’re also in Madrid.Likewise there’s Mercury Steam who are collaborating with CodeMasters (virtually no presence on MobyGames and Wikipedia), Madrid.As for smaller developers, there’s Virtual Toys (DS developer, Madrid), BitManagers (last GBA game released 2003, Barcelona), OkerFactory (PC & Mobile, San Sebastian).Also, the three year old Tragnarion studio in Palma de Mallorca has recently announced they’ll be using Unreal 3 for their upcoming project. One of my old colleagues has interviewed who speaks well of the impression they made on him. However, other friends had some very negative things to say,” i was in mallorca… was raelly nice… warm weather :-)the guy I talked to seemed nice, the company seemed nice generally, the office was ok, but there was just something that gave me a funny feeling… cant point it out though”Me:I looked at their office on Google and it seems like a pretty industrial areaits in an IKEA buildingand they are owned by ikeawell not quite.. but something like thatthe investor giving them all their money is the one who set up all the IKEAs in spain or soand he thinks the games industry is cool and wanted to invest in itwithout bugging them too much it seemsso they seem to have quite some freedom, compared to having some publisher with contanst pressure*constantbut like I said… there was something which I cant point out that gave me bad vibes i have to say I found mallorca very nice toomuch more so than I expectedjust not too sureabout that companyalso I dont know what mallorca is like in the main tourist season…they have a LOT of shopping there though.. but most of it was closed now”An another friend had even more harsh things to say about Carl Jones, the studio manager,“Oh boy.Ok.<candid>He is the omega wanker – the wanker from which all other wanker’s images were wraught.</candid>”Incidentally flatshares seem to go for around 350 Euros per person per month, which is similar to what I was paying in Vienna.Games-Industry.biz has a directory of development studios in Spain.There’s also a group called ADESE, who have a list of publishers in Spain.And there’s a global map of studios which might be of interest.More about Spain and Madrid,
Quality of Life:Mercer rated Madrid as 42nd for quality of life in their 2007 global survey (London was slightly better in 39th position) and 56th for health and sanitation.
Cost of Living:Mercer’s 2007 survey revealed Madrid to be 26th most expensive (with an index of 92.1 compared to London in 2nd place with an index of 126.3)There’s also a handy salary converter and some detail about the cost of daily goods.
Politics:The last election was in 2004, so they’re due for another in 2008.
“Here we have the average temperatures in each month in Madrid: – January: 9 ºC- February: 11 ºC- March: 15 ºC- April: 19 ºC- May: 22 ºC- June: 27 ºC- July: 31 ºC- August: 32 ºC- September: 25 ºC- October: 18 ºC- November: 13 ºC- December: 9 ºC”
And last, but by no means least,
Sounds like a plan!
too much cannabis stuff being posted here! get a life man ;P
in other news, I interviewed at Pyro in madrid before I moved to CPH
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I’ve just read about Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and their Máster en Creación de Videojuegos, which is unfortunately only in Spanish. Alejandro Ramírez Montero is the professor of that course, and conducts research on “Videogame technologies & AI, Unreal game engine”.
UPF also have a research team called “Grup de Tecnologies Interactives” who apparently conduct research into “Digital video, cinema and videogames“.