The awards night for the Game Developers Conference is always a hoot. It starts out with the Independent Games Festival, where the industry celebrates the students, amateurs, and one-person shops.
One of my favorite games of the year on the iPhone, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor by developer Tiger Style, won the award for best mobile game. But Monaco took home the Seumas McNally Grand Prize award for the best game of 2009.
The indie folks are always cute and touching when they go up on stage. They thank their parents and somebody somewhere who believed in their dreams of making games for a living. One of the winners went up on stage and acted like a robot, pausing and drinking water before finally saying thanks.
Each time someone went up, a roar of applause erupted. But, in a rarity for the show, no one flipped a bird tonight at the “evil game publishers” who publish games on behalf of developers and keep most of the money. This is the place where, surrounded by a thousand or two game developers, the creators of games get to vent and celebrate. The wonderful thing for these indie game makers is that there are more ways than ever before that a budding young game creator can upload a game to an app store and make a pile of money from it.
And, interestingly enough, the indie games these days are not so different from the games in the main awards show, the Game Developers Choice Award. The Game Developers Choice Awards are the serious awards for the grown-up games, or the ones with big budgets and corporate publishers. But they’re still selected via a peer process, with game developers themselves voting on the awards.
The newest category this year is the Best Social Game category. Warren Spector, host of the evening (pictured at top) and designer of Disney’s upcoming Epic Mickey game, said that social games give everyone a chance to make a game that will be played by millions upon millions. Of course, Zynga’s FarmVille, which has more than 83 million monthly active users on Facebook, won the first prize ever for the Best Social Game.
Bill Mooney, a general manager at Zynga, accepted the award for FarmVille. “It’s funny,” he said. “Two years ago, there were 20 people sitting in a crappy little room.” His small team effort, he said, felt much more like an indie development team and he encouraged indies to keep going, grow the space, and have fun.
Flower, a creative title on the PlayStation Network, won for best downloadable game. The entire team, pictured right, went up on stage to accept the award. Jenova Chen, the co-creator of the game, said the power of games is like a nuclear bomb, and with that comes a responsibility. He said he was working on Flower on a Sunday because he wanted to do so. That happened to be the day he lost his girlfriend (i.e., broke up), Chen said. But the game — where the gamer plays the wind in the dream of a flower in a dilapidated city — made him feel better on that day. Those comments will probably stick with me for a while.
Penny Arcade, the company that puts on the fan game conference of the same name, won the Ambassador Award.
Throughout the show, the satire team from Mega64.com acted out funny videos about scenes from games in videos. This year, they were joined in one of the videos by Gabe Newell, recipient of the Pioneer award of the evening and the co-founder of Valve, maker of Half-Life and the Left 4 Dead games. Newell delivered an interesting speech about the game business. He said his company took about six years to make their first game. Their publisher, Sierra, wanted them to publish it much earlier than that. Valve refused and funded it with money from the founders. Sierra eventually published it in 1998 and got 96 out of 100 average ratings from game critics. It sold more than 10 million copies and allowed Valve to change the industry with Steam, a digital game downloading service that has become extremely popular as an alternative to distribution at retail stores.
Newell predicted that biometrics such as motion control of games would be the next big frontier. He also said Intel’s Larrabee graphics chips (if they ever come out) will change the industry. Flat organizations (without many layers of management) will be the most innovative. Partnership and open platforms will matter. But the platforms are headed toward splintering and that is a bad idea for customers. He had more to say, but then his PowerPoint program and his PC, gave him the Blue Screen of Death. (That turned out to be a joke).
After that, star game developer Will Wright, now at his own startup the Stupid Fun Club, came up on stage. He talked with his Powerpoint about “why John Carmack rocks.” He presented all of the reasons why Carmack, a graphics wizard and co-founder of id Software, deserved the lifetime achievement award in games. Carmack said he writes code every single day and managed to avoid becoming an incompetent executive. He’s been working on games since the early days of Apple. He said game graphics have gotten better by a factor of a million during his career and that the best is yet to come.
Winner of game of the year was no surprise. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony on the PlayStation 3, took home the big title as well as a bunch of other awards. The surprise of the night was actually when Spector got up on stage and announced that the next game his former team is making is Deus Ex Human Evolution, the third in a long-running series that Spector created. (Spector’s own team is working on the Epic Mickey title, so he won’t be involved). Square Enix is the publisher.