2009 Game Developers Choice Awards Honor Kojima For Lifetime Achievement

Author: by Staff

The 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in game development acknowledging excellence in game creation, will honor Hideo Kojima with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s ceremony taking place at the Game Developers Conference next month. Kojima is Corporate Officer, Executive Producer and Director of Kojima Productions and creator of the seminal Metal Gear series, and the Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of developers who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development. Renowned as one of the world’s most influential contemporary game developers, Hideo Kojima first decided to get involved in the game development business while studying economics. Driven by the hardware limitations of the MSX personal computer, he pursued a fresh approach to the action game genre – and thus the stealth genre was born with 1987's Metal Gear for Konami. After creating the cult Snatcher and Policenauts franchises, the global breakthrough for Kojima’s career took place in 1998 when Konami's Metal Gear Solid was released on Sony’s PlayStation platform. This seminal title has been followed by a host of important sequels and franchise additions, including the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and 2008's multi-million selling Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots. Kojima also produced the well-received mech action Zone of the Enders series, and also created Boktai: The Sun in your Hand, a Game Boy Advance game which contained a photometric sunlight sensor in the cartridge that charged a vampire hunter’s solar weapon, another example of the designer's signature disruption of traditional gaming mechanics. “For years, Hideo Kojima’s contributions to game development have broken new ground and inspired the community to think about creating games in never-before-imagined ways,” said Meggan Scavio, event director of the Game Developers Conference. “From giving birth to the stealth action game genre to showing game makers how to interact with their players by breaking the ‘fourth wall,’ Kojima’s achievements make him an obvious choice for an award that in previous years has gone to luminaries including Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Richard Garriott, Eugene Jarvis, Mark Cerny, Gunpei Yokoi, Yuji Naka and Will Wright.” Presented by GDC and Webby-award winning Gamasutra.com, the awards ceremony is held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival and will be hosted on March 25, in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The editors of Gamasutra.com, who are in charge of award management, worked in association with the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), John Vechey (PopCap), Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), and Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), to pick the Special Award winners following audience nominations. Hideo Kojima will also be making his Game Developers Conference speaking debut at GDC09 when he gives the keynote lecture, “Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible,” the morning after the Choice Awards Ceremony, on Thursday, March 26, 2009 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PST in the Esplanade Room of the Moscone Center’s South Hall. For further information about the Game Developers Choice Awards, please visit the official Choice Awards website. For further information about GDC and to register for attendance, please visit the official GDC website.