SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Organizers of the
17th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premier accolades
for peer recognition celebrating the industry's top games, studios
and developers, will recognize Tim
Sweeney, founder of Epic Games and creator of ZZT,
Unreal and Unreal Engine, with this year's Lifetime Achievement
Award.
Sweeney will be honored at the Game Developers Choice Awards
ceremony, taking place on Wednesday, March
1st, 2017 at 6:30pm at the San
Francisco Moscone Center during the 2017 Game Developers
Conference, and in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival
(IGF). The ceremonies are available to attend for all GDC 2017
pass-holders and will be livestreamed on the GDC's official Twitch
channel at www.twitch.tv/gdc.
Sweeney founded seminal shareware game publisher Epic MegaGames
in 1991, and the release of its first product, ZZT, led to
an explosion of user-created worlds. ZZT has become so
beloved as a game/application that it recently led to a full-length
book dissection – in the Boss Fight Books series - of the games and
culture it created. An expanded Epic MegaGames also released titles
such as Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball and Tyrian in
the '90s as a leader in the PC shareware space.
While serving as the founder and CEO of a renamed Epic, Sweeney
was the main architect of the first-generation Unreal Engine. This
game engine was originally created for the 1998 PC game
Unreal. But it became the underpinning for a slew of
acclaimed games, initially in the Unreal franchise and
increasingly licensed outside of Epic, including the
BioShock series, Tom
Clancy's Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, and the
Batman: Arkham series.
Sweeney also worked to make the Unreal Engine extensible via
UnrealScript, a spiritual successor to his object-oriented
scripting language for ZZT. This simple way for non-coders
to get complex creations made easily led to extensive and creative
player modding of games - one of the earliest blossoming of
user-generated content.
But it also led to easier adaptations of the engine – which has
now had four major iterations - to other games. These include
Epic's own titles such as Gears of War, Paragon and
Fortnite, as well as notable independently created games
such as Rocket League, Abzû, Astroneer and ARK: Survival
Evolved. The engine is now being adapted by non-game
development teams across the automotive, aviation, architecture,
VR/AR, complex data visualization and film sectors.
Sweeney joins the roster of previous Lifetime Achievement Award
recipients which includes Todd
Howard, Shigeru Miyamoto,
Warren Spector, John Carmack, Hironobu
Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima,
Sid Meier, Ken Kutaragi, Dr.
Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Peter
Molyneux, among others.
Recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award are chosen by
the Game Developers Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which
includes notable game industry leaders such as Mark Cerny (Cerny
Games), Doug Lombardi
(Valve), Angie Smets (Guerrilla
Games), Amir Rao (Supergiant Games)
and Jade Raymond (Electronic
Arts).
For more information about the 17th Annual Game Developers
Choice Awards, visit: http://www.gamechoiceawards.com/. To learn
more about GDC 2017, follow @Official_GDC or visit:
http://www.gdconf.com/. Both the Game Developers Choice Awards and
IGF ceremonies are available to attend for all GDC 2017
pass-holders and will be livestreamed on the GDC's official
Twitch channel.
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