At that stage, I'd been rushing around GDC for two days, sitting in on talks, hammering away at my keyboard in the press room and drinking more than enough coffee to ensure that my jetlagged eyes didn't fall shut on me.
Yet Wednesday was the day GDC started proper. Wednesday was the day the expo opened up.
If anyone had told me on the Monday that yet more people would soon be cramming into the frankly mammoth Moscone Center in San Francisco a couple of days later, I wouldn't have believed them.
Nonetheless, estimates suggest 23,000 people attended the Game Developers Conference this year, and it's possible that I bumped into/queued behind/slopped my hastily poured coffee over each and every one of them during my five day run.
I'd return to my hotel room each night - before dashing back out again to 'network' - to tend to my wounds. Literally. The longer the week went on, the more blisters popped up on my feet, leading me to deduce that my body inflates when in contact with the Californian sun.
Yet, despite my hobbled walk and buzzing eyes, I can only conclude that GDC was worth the pain. It was worth the sweat. It was worth what my Doctor tells me has already become a 'highly damaging' caffeine dependency.
Size and sessions
Indeed, even if you're something of a regular at events around the UK and Europe, nothing can really prepare you for the scale of GDC.
Aside from the fact that, around any corner, you could potentially run into anyone a friend, a rival, or the CEO of that company that amassed more users overnight than you've managed across your entire career what really stands out about GDC is the quality of the sessions.
For starters, at any one time there are several worth sitting in on at various points around the Moscone Center. The variety of them, too, leaves other events trailing in GDC's dust.
NaturalMotion's Torsten Reil talks CSR Racing
Personal highlights included many of the postmortems that analysed the success or not of some of the industry's biggest releases, with the queue for King's Candy Crush Saga talk worth a story in its own right.
There was also Halfbrick's revealing look at the game concept that almost 'tore the studio apart', and a presentation by Beyond the Final Boss an organisation fuelled by those working in the industry who were bullied as kids, reaching out to the kids of today suffering the same torment.
Yet, despite the wealth of superb sessions on offer, it's still hard for me a member of the press who, dare I admit it, gets into events such as GDC without charge to justify the cost of GDC to developers who tend not to have money to burn.
Money matters
Over the course of GDC, I had several conversations with attendees sporting various levels of passes about just how much they'd paid to be there.
For those with an all access tag hanging around their neck, they'd spent the kind of amounts that, if I were in their position, I'd find hard to budget for.
They were numbers, too, that didn't include flight costs, money splashed out on varying qualities of accommodation, or the small question of actually paying out for food and drink while there.
Even for those with just an expo pass - the most basic of those on offer - GDC 2013 was no small investment. As with all of the industry's big events, however, in the long run the cost of not being there has the potential to far outweigh the money spent forked out to book a spot.
On the bright side, maybe you don't even need a ticket.
Given that half of GDC actually takes place outside of the Moscone Center's walls at lunch, at parties, during drunken conversations while stumbling back to your hotel room maybe you don't need a pass at all.
'Too much to see'
It's not hard to imagine that anyone simply stood outside the Moscone Center waiting for people they knew (or, if they were bold enough, people they didn't know) to cross from hall to hall could have made just as many valuable connections as those with access all areas passes.
Indeed, something similar became common practice outside of GDC's press room: Company heads keen to link up with specific journalists would stalk the doorway, introducing themselves as people came and went. And why not? That's exactly what GDC is for.
A similar stance for those stood outside in the San Francisco sun could have proved just as fruitful, and perhaps the greatest argument for turning up ticketless is the fact that, at GDC, there's almost too much to see.
Left to right, Moscone North and South
PocketGamer.biz could easily have flown 20 odd staff over to cover the event, and we'd have all still had too much to write about, too many people to see, too many plasters to stick on our blister-laden feet.
By the same token, there's comfort in the knowledge that even those able to swan from room to room will only be taking in a fraction of what GDC has to offer.
For instance, I'd personally scheduled plenty of time to walk around the expo itself, but that was quickly whittled down to a series of quick five minute dashes as talks proved more fruitful than I'd estimated and merely walking around the convention itself increasingly delivered chance encounters and business cards exchanges arguably worth the flight costs alone.
It's simply not possible to see everything you want to see, and meet everyone you want to meet.
Party planners
Not that I'm advocating that people who have enough money should pass up on a ticket and, instead, spend their days hugging the curbs of the Moscone Center if you can afford it, book your slot for next year as soon as it's available.
But, as with Develop and Casual Connect, there's value in simply being part of the conversation.
It's telling that one of our most popular GDC articles right up to the last day was our rundown of the parties running across San Francisco night after night.
As far as I can see, none of these shindigs required you to have a GDC tag around your neck, and as we all know people tend to be a bit more willing to talk to complete strangers once they're a little inebriated.
Even arranging to go to dinner with developers you know can deliver the goods: More so than any other event I've intended, people at GDC go out of their way to introduce and connect people from different wings of the industry they happen know over a beer or two.
Scan the tables at many San Francisco restaurants last week, and you'll have seen indies sat with folk from prominent publishers, or coders conversing with CEOs.
In short, you have to be there. For one week every year, San Francisco is the centre of the gaming universe, and even if you're just a satellite spinning on the outskirts, it's important you be in its orbit.
