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BAMZOOKi

Gameware Development / CBBC

Develop Awards 2008

Some 600 games development professionals packed into the Metropole Hotel in Brighton to see the best of the UK games development talent honoured at the sixth annual Develop Industry Excellence Awards.

Rockstar was the big winner, its Rockstar North team taking home the Visual Arts and Audio Accomplishment prizes for Grand Theft Auto IV, and the Best In-House Developer award. The overall Grand Prix was given to its parent label Rockstar Games.

Animation tool company Natural Motion and facial animation firm Image Metrics also bagged an award for their Technical Innovation work on GTA IV.

Elsewhere, UK independents won big. Frontier Developments took the Best New IP prize for WiiWare title Lost Winds, Kuju’s Doublesix won Best New Studio, Splash Damage was named Best Independent and Ideaworks3D Best Mobile Studio. Traveller’s Tales won the Best Use of a License prize for its Lego Indiana Jones game and Realtime Worlds took home the Business Development Prize.

International leaders in games development were also honoured for their support of European studios. Nintendo nabbed the Publishing Hero award for the launch of WiiWare while Epic Games was named Best Tools Provider for its Unreal Engine 3.

Elsewhere, OPM was named Best Recruitment Firm, Babel Media the Best Services firm, Richard Jacques Studio the Creative Outsourcing King - and the University of Abertay & Dare to be Digital were the first winners in the inaugural Games:Edu New Talent Award.

The full list of winners is as follows:

CATEGORY: CREATIVITY

Best New IP
Lost Winds (Frontier Developments)

Best use of a Licence
Lego Indiana Jones (Traveller’s Tales)

Visual Arts
Rockstar North (Grand Theft Auto IV)

Audio Accomplishment
Rockstar North (Grand Theft Auto IV)

Publishing Hero
Nintendo

CATEGORY: TECHNOLOGY

Tools Provider
Epic Games

Technical Innovation
NaturalMotion / Image Metrics (Grand Theft Auto IV)

Creative Outsourcing
Richard Jacques Studios

Services
Babel Media

Recruitment Company
OPM