Last week’s awards were really about thanking everyone for being involved over the past year in gamedevelopers.ie: the volunteer moderators (Tony, Dave, Ronny and John) the people behind the scenes in DCU (Padraig, Niall, Johnnyslim), the writers (Pavel, Jamie, and others) and of course the people on the boards.

highlights

I started off the awards part of the evening with a few memories. Who remembers the Sony and the GAA license discussion, the nGage criticism thread, the creative thread and the Myth of Innovation thread? Then there were the new ‘start up’ rumours where people had seen recruitment ads in the UK press and we all tried to guess who they might be.

I also met a lot of new people through the boards on gamedevelopers.ie. Many of them are working here in Ireland, but we’ve also reached out to Irish people working in the games industry abroad. For example, Paul McLaughlin, head of art at Lionhead studios and the editor of gamesindustry.biz, Rob Fahey, again Irish. We also had a feature interview with Dave Perry, originally from Belfast and head of Shiny Entertainment in the US.

My memories of the shindigs are pretty clear given the amount of orange juice I’ve consumed over the past year. It was great though to to see Jab for the first time (!) and to meet people from Muff, Co. Donegal. Those Demonware t-shirts also have to be seen to be properly appreciated. (Tony is sporting one in the pic above but you can’t see what it says underneath the rabbits)

And to the awards…

The nominees in the five categories: stamina, sprint, humour, salmon of knowledge and gd.ie person of the year were announced last week and Jab, Padraig and I went through the forums checking your nominations and adding our own. There wasn’t much disagreement – well there was a bit, but we are all still friends. A big thanks to Ian for his help in sourcing and designing the awards.

The winners were:

1. Stamina: Pete who registered on the forums on the 1st of April 2003, has 112 posts and still regularly posts. A graduate of Ballyfermot he works with Torc Interactive in Donegal creating low and high poly content. He is a regular at the shindigs and survived the marathon GDC this year.

2. Sprint: Kyotokid: Ivan McCloskey is a level designer in Dundee and has been working for Visual Science for the past 5 months. He registered on the forums on gamedevelopers.ie on the 6th of Feb. 2004 but already has 59 posts, an average of 1.1 posts a day. Unfortunately Ivan couldn’t be with us but he will be home soon to collect his award.

3. Humour: Ian Hannigan for overall contributions to the forums but also for the Ngage thread and the subsequent postings. Ian works as an interaction designer in eSpatial in Dublin and was a finalist in the N-Gage Challenge last year.

4. Salmon of Knowledge: Michael Griffin for occasional gems and especially his ‘Lessons learned the hard way’ thread, 3rd April 03. Michael is the CEO of Kapooki Games in Dublin and a member of the IGDA Ireland committee.

5. Finally, the GD.ie Person of the Year award went to Tony Kelly (aka Idora, see pic above). Tony Kelly works as a Senior Producer in Intel’s Innovation group. With a degree in graphic design from NCAD he has been working on web & multimedia development since 1995. He is currently designing & developing simulations and games, and is the person behind the formation of an Irish IGDA chapter in Jan. 04.

And the award for the best acceptance speech goes to….(only joking)…

Thanks to all for coming, thanks for my presents, which made it home eventually the next day, and here’s to a bigger and brighter year ahead.