2007 Independent Games Festival Entries Revealed

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival (part of the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra) have announced that a record 141 entries have been entered into this year's IGF Main Competition, which awards the best independent games created worldwide. Some of the many diverse titles entered include undersea 2D adventure title Aquaria, Xbox 360 Live Arcade title Castle Crashers, physics puzzle game Armadillo Run, and space station simulator SpaceStationSim, and the Main Competition finalists picked from all entered titles will be announced on December 4th of this year. In addition, the IGF's judge list has been extensively overhauled and enhanced for this year, and includes mainstream and indie game professionals from companies such as Big Huge Games, Nihilistic, Sony, Red Storm, Metanet, Vicarious Visions, Reflexive Microsoft, and Crytek, as well as notable journalists and bloggers from Penny Arcade, Wired, Kotaku, Joystiq, Edge, Slashdot, and Wired News. This year’s festival will award over $50,000 in total cash prizes (including Mod and Student Awards) at a ceremony during the Game Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco next March, with the Main Competition giving out five major prizes for Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio, Technical Excellence, Best Web Browser Game, and the standout Innovation Award, chosen from a pool of finalists. Additional honors will be presented for the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and the Audience Award, which is voted for online - previous winners of the Grand Prize have included Introversion's Darwinia, Chronic Logic's Gish, and Reflexive's Wik & The Fable Of Souls. All Independent Games Festival finalists will be playable in the IGF Pavilion at GDC from March 7th to 9th, 2007, and there will be IGF/indie gaming-themed lectures and roundtables held earlier in that week. The next deadline for prospective entrants is October 13, 2006 at 11:59pm PDT for the IGF Mod Competition, which is allowing mods from any game to compete - from Thief to Half-Life 2 to Oblivion to The Sims and beyond, all mods are eligible. From the entrants, we will pick Best Singleplayer FPS Mod, Best Multiplayer FPS Mod, Best RPG Mod, and Best 'Other' Mod finalists (each a $500 prize), and those winners will show at the 2007 GDC, competing for an overall $5,000 Best Mod prize.