Special awardees for the next month’s 15th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) have revealed first two names for this year.
The Ambassador Award, honouring someone who is helping video games “advance to a better place” through advocacy or action, is going to game designer and academic Brenda Romero, who has been a key figure in video games throughout more than three decades of standout game design, teaching and advocacy.
Ambassador Award winner Romero, whose honour was bestowed after open nominations from the game development community, and voting by the Game Developers Choice Advisory Committee is an award-winning game designer and academic who entered the video game industry in 1981 at the age of 15.
She is the longest continuously serving woman in the video game industry. As a designer, she has contributed to many seminal titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series. Away from the machine, her analog series of six games, The Mechanic is the Message, has drawn national and international acclaim, particularly Train, which has been demonstrated at GDC on multiple occasions, and Siochan Leat (The Irish Game), which is presently housed in the National Museum of Play. Brenda’s work advocating passionately for games – and the role of women in them – over the past three decades made her a natural choice for this award.
David Braben is being awarded with Pioneer Award, honoring breakthrough tech and game design milestones. He is the co-creator of seminal 3D space exploration title Elite – now in resurgence with Elite: Dangerous – and co-founder of the foundation for the popular ‘hobbyist computer revival’ Raspberry Pi device.
Pioneer Award winner David Braben co-developed the seminal ‘open world’ 3D space trading game Elite with Ian Bell while at university in the early 1980s. The best-selling, startlingly expansive title had revolutionary 3D graphics and let the player make all kinds of intriguing moral decisions as they flew the known universe.
