Luminaries to Receive Recognition for Indelible Impact on Game Industry
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- The Game Developers Choice
Awards Advisory Board has named the 2007 special award recipients: Alexey
Pajitnov, creator of Tetris, will receive the First Penguin Award for
pioneering the casual games market; adventure game hall-of-famer Greg
Costikyan will receive the Maverick Award for his tireless efforts to
create a viable channel for indie games; game audio legend George "The
Fatman" Sanger will receive the Community Contribution Award for his
numerous programs that encourage interactive audio innovation and industry
improvement; and Nintendo game design icon Shigeru Miyamoto will receive
the Lifetime Achievement Award for a career that spans the creation of
Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda to the company's
recent revolutionary systems, Nintendo DS and Wii.
The Game Developers Choice Award ceremony, hosted by Tim Schafer of
Double Fine Productions, will take place during CMP Technology's Game
Developers Conference (GDC) on Wednesday, March 7 at 6:30 p.m. within the
Esplanade Ballroom of the Moscone Center's South Hall. The ceremony is
produced by the GDC and presented by the International Game Developers
Association (IGDA).
First Penguin Award
The First Penguin Award acknowledges developers who dive head first
into unknown territory and pave the way for the rest of the development
community. This year's award will go to Alexey Pajitnov, whose creation of
the now- legendary game, Tetris, gave birth to the casual game industry and
set the bar which every puzzle game to follow would aim to match.
In 1985, while working for the Computer Center of the Moscow Academy of
Science, a Soviet government-funded R&D center, Pajitnov developed "a
charmingly simple and utterly addictive computer game" as an exercise to
test a new computer, the Electronica. He based his game on a popular puzzle
called The Pentamino Puzzle whose objective was to fit different
geometric-shaped pieces into a box. The game, Tetris, soon came out of the
Soviet Union and into worldwide circulation with a historic 1989 licensing
agreement that paired the game with the Nintendo Game Boy. Pajitnov has
also produced games including Faces, Welltris, Knight Moves, and Hatris.
Since then, Pajitnov has helped produce several sequels to Tetris,
including Tetris 2 and Super Tetris. He also helped design the puzzles in
the Super NES versions of Yoshi's Cookie and designed the game Pandora's
Box, which incorporates more traditional jig- saw style puzzles. Now a
resident of Washington State, Pajitnov joined Microsoft in 1996 as the
computer technology giant's first staff games designer. He has worked for
the Microsoft Entertainment Collection Puzzle Pack and MSN Mind Aerobics.
Since 2004, he has been part of the Microsoft Zone Group to create games
for MSN.
Community Contribution Award
The Community Contribution Award is presented to a developer who
embodies the spirit of community and encourages improvement among peers.
George "The Fatman" Sanger, music and sound designer for more than 250
games, including LOOM, Wing Commander, The 7th Guest, NASCAR Racing,
Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo and ATF, will receive this year's award for his
development of programs that enrich and encourage advancements within the
interactive audio community and industry in general.
Sanger has been creating music and other audio for games since Thin Ice
for Intellivision in 1983. In 1991, at the first Spotlight Awards, the
Audio award went to Sanger's Wing Commander, and one of the only other two
nominees was Sanger's LOOM. At various developer conferences, Sanger has
hosted "Demo Marathons" to allow game producers to be exposed to the music
of many musicians from all over the world in a single sitting. His writings
in his Music and Computers Magazine column, "Ride the Wired Surf," were
meant to promote ideals and attitudes that would lead to better music on
computers. On the edge of the Canyon of the Eagles over the Colorado River,
Sanger hosts both the annual Texas Interactive Music Conference and BBQ
(Project Bar-B-Q), the computer/music industry's most prestigious and
influential conference. Based on 11 successful years of influencing and
galvanizing the audio and technical community at BBQ, in 2006 Sanger hosted
the first Project Horseshoe, an intense think-tank aimed at solving game
design's toughest problems. Sanger's book, "The Fat Man on Game Audio:
Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness," is less a technical work than a treatise
on the benefits of living creatively and treating people well.
Maverick Award
The Maverick Award recognizes those who take risks by experimenting
with unconventional methods. The recipient of this year's award is Greg
Costikyan, whose online retailer Manifesto Games is dedicated to creating
an opportunity and creative environment for independent games similar to
what the independent film and music movements have provided for those
forms.
Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published board, role-
playing, online, computer, and mobile games. He has written extensively on
games, design, and industry business for publications that include the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal Interactive, Salon, Game Developer magazine
and The Escapist. His games have won five Origins Awards and a Gamer's
Choice Award, and have been selected on more than a dozen occasions for
Games Magazine's Games 100, their annual round-up of the best games in
print. He is an inductee into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame for a
lifetime of accomplishment, and has lectured at the Copenhagen ITU, the
University of Art & Design Helsinki, and SUNY/Stony Brook and he speaks
frequently at industry conferences including GDC, E3, and DiGRA. Over the
years, he has also served as Director of R&D for West End Games, lead
designer for Crossover Technologies, Chief Design Officer for Unplugged
Games (a mobile games start- up he co-founded in 2000), a game industry
consultant, and a games researcher for Nokia. Costikyan left Nokia in 2005
to co-found Manifesto Games with Johnny Wilson, which launched in late
September of 2006. Manifesto Games is an ecommerce retailer of
independently developed games, based on long-tail theory. Manifesto Games
is a self-described wild-eyed, radical and utopian attempt to transform the
game industry by recapturing the creative vigor, willingness to experiment,
and exciting potential of its youth.
Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Achievement Award will be given to Nintendo game design
icon Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 as a staff artist
and quickly built a reputation for himself. In 1981, Nintendo released
Miyamoto's creation Donkey Kong to arcades, launching what would come to be
known as his first masterpiece. In 1985, Nintendo released their Nintendo
Entertainment System with Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros.; over time, more
than 40 million units of the game were sold worldwide, and a series of
mega-hit titles was born, including the 1996 Nintendo 64 best seller, Super
Mario 64. More than 193 million video games in the Super Mario series have
been sold worldwide. To date, Miyamoto has worked on more than 100
different Nintendo video game titles, supporting younger video game
creators as a producer for Kirby and Pokemon games. Miyamoto's most recent
video game projects include Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight
Princess, Nintendogs, Super Mario Galaxy and design work on the Wii
hardware. He also was responsible for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,
Metroid Prime, Super Mario Sunshine, Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion and The Legend
of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which has been called the greatest video game of
all time.
Recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award are selected by the Choice
Awards Advisory Board, comprised of a diverse set of developers from around
the globe. Past recipients of this award include Richard Garriott, Eugene
Jarvis, Mark Cerny, Gunpei Yokoi (posthumously), Yuji Naka and Will Wright.
"This year's recipients of the Game Developers Choice Award special
honors reflect the dramatic impact of their visionary creations and
industry work," said Jamil Moledina, Executive Director of the Game
Developers Conference. "Our four honorees are each responsible for
inspiring the industry to creative heights through personal example and
challenging conventional wisdom."
"The IGDA applauds our special honorees. These awards are only a small
token of the industry's enormous appreciation for what they have done for
us," said Jason Della Rocca, Executive Director of the IGDA.
The seventh annual Game Developers Choice Awards will also hand out
honors for Best Game, Audio, Character Design, Game Design, Technology,
Visual Arts, Writing and Innovation. For more information about the
ceremony or award nominees, please visit http://www.gamechoiceawards.com.
About the International Game Developers Association (IGDA)
The International Game Developers Association is a non-profit
professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and
enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their
peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that
affect the developer community. For more information on the IGDA, please
visit http://www.igda.org.
About the CMP Game Group (http://www.cmpgame.com)
A core provider of essential information to the professional game
industry, the CMP Game Group offers market-defining content, and drives
community through its award winning lineup of print, online and event
products. These include Game Developer magazine, the Webby Award-winning
Gamasutra.com, SeriousGamesSource.com, GameCareerGuide.com, the Game
Developers Conference, the Austin Game Developers Conference, GDC China,
GDC Mobile, the Serious Games Summit, the Hollywood and Games Summit, the
Game Career Seminars, the Independent Games Festival, and the Game
Developers Choice Awards. For more information, please visit
http://www.cmpgame.com.
About CMP Technology (http://www.cmp.com)
CMP Technology is a marketing solutions company serving the technology
industry. Through its market-leading portfolio of trusted information
brands, CMP has earned the confidence of more technology professionals than
any other media company. As a result, CMP is the premier provider of
access, insight and actionable programs designed to connect sellers and
buyers in ways that yield superior return on investment. CMP Technology is
a subsidiary of United Business Media (http://www.unitedbusinessmedia.com), a
global provider of news distribution and specialist information services
with a market capitalization of more than $3 billion.
SOURCE CMP Game Group
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http://www.gamechoiceawards.com
http://www.cmpgame.com http://www.igda.org
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CONTACT:
Sibel Sunar, sibel@fortyseven.com, or Brian
Rubin, brian@fortyseven.com, of fortyseven communications,
+1-323-658-1200, for CMP Game Group; or Tara Gibb of CMP Game
Group, +1-415-947-6219, tgibb@cmp.com
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