San Francisco, LA, Austin, Raleigh, Montreal...these are game cities. Philadelphia, not so much. But a passionate fivesome, including an audio engineer, a developer, a local game exec, a lawyer and a professor have banded together to make the City of Brotherly Love into the "Hollywood of Gaming."

It's a tall order to be sure. Part of the inspiration for their mission stemmed from a tough choice 24-year-old developer Hardik Bhatt (right, above) found himself facing after graduating from St. Joseph's in 2007 — stay in the city he adores or pursue the career he was born for, elsewhere. The dilemma stewed until he took a trip to GDC, where he presented a controller-less game he'd made called Maxwell's Demon. At the Developers Conference, Bhatt noticed a slew of municipalities and states luring studios to set up shop and wondered, "Where is Philly?" When he got back home, Bhatt got together with audio engineer Mike Worth (left, above) and started the Videogame Growth Initiative.

Today, Bhatt and company are working to prize incentives out of the city to make Philly more attractive for game development. It's a tough pitch for a city in the midst of a financial crisis. Nonetheless, Worth insists that Philly is an ideal place for making games. Highest on the list of attractions is a very low cost of living. Plus, the city is home to four Ivy League schools, including the only Ivy to offer a game development program, the University of Pennsylvania.

Regardless of how well the Videogame Growth Initiative fares in Philly, the moral of this story is the power of networking amongst gamemakers from different regions. The growth of national conferences like GDC has not only raised the profile of gaming on the national stage it has also exposed budding entrepreneurs and developers to a whole host of new business models and funding strategies. While player community building is an important part of making successful games, developer community building is critical to the success of gamemaking itself.

[via Philadelphia City Paper]