2010 ELAN Awards Trade Vancouver For San Diego

The 2010 ELAN Awards ceremony, which will recognize achievements in the fields of video games, animation and visual effects, is headed to San Diego, Calif. after holding all three previous events in Vancouver. The three-day event will begin on Saturday, July 17, kicking off two days of parties. Award winners will be recognized at the 2010 ELAN Awards Gala on July 19, the evening before the start of San Diego Comic Con. The U.S. relaunch will mark the fourth annual ELANs, and will include a dinner and awards show at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. ELAN founder and CEO Holly Carinci said the video game industry needs an awards celebration on par with major events in movies, television and music. "Music has the Grammy's; television the Emmy's; movies the Oscars and Golden Globes," she said in a statement. Carinci added, "Video gaming is the fastest growing sector of the entertainment industry and is now bigger than all of them and as the number one industry in entertainment it deserves an awards ceremony that celebrates this magnificent industry's growth and position, and yet it has nothing close to these esteemed ceremonies." Working alongside Carinci this year is newly-appointed ELAN Awards U.S./Europe chairman and co-founder Justin Townsend, founder of in-game ad firm IGA Worldwide. ELAN organizers said the event will host 1,000 nominees and their guests. Previous hosts for the ceremony include actor William Shatner, SpongeBob SquarePants' Tom Kenny, and Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane. A host for the 2010 awards wasn't named, but the organization said there will be two next year -- one from Hollywood, the other from the games industry. Last year's ELAN Awards saw Valve's Left 4 Dead win video game of the year, with other titles including Bethesda's Fallout 3, Epic's Gears of War 2, and Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst winning other categories.