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This March's 11th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the peer-awarded highest honors in video game development, have revealed the recipients of its two final Special Awards - the Pioneer Award, for creating breakthrough video game genres or concepts, and the Ambassador Award, for those who "helped the game industry advance to a better place".
This year's Pioneer Award will be given to Sega Corporation veteran and game design legend Yu Suzuki, honoring his amazing work over the last three decades, inventing entire game genres and making seminal titles spanning Hang On through Virtua Fighter to Out Run, After Burner and Shenmue - and beyond.
In addition, the Ambassador Award, also picked by the prestigious Game Developers Choice Awards Committee, will celebrate the managers of the Game Developers Conference Associates (CA) program, Tim Brengle and Ian MacKenzie.
Yu Suzuki
Sega veteran Yu Suzuki will be making a rare Western appearance to accept his award in person on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at the San Francisco Moscone Center during Game Developers Conference 2011, where he will also be presenting a special one-off game design lecture.
Suzuki himself first joined Sega Corporation in 1983 and is well known for his many industry firsts and genre-originating titles. In 1985, Suzuki created innovative arcade game Hang On, one of the first ever titles where the player's movement on a motorcycle facsimile was copied by the onscreen avatar.
From there, Suzuki's output defined a 'golden age' of Sega arcade games, including all time classics such as Out Run, Space Harrier, After Burner, Power Drift, and Virtua Racing. Following this, his pioneering work in 1993 created Virtua Fighter, which spawned the 3D fighting game genre, and has been recognized for its contribution in the fields of Art & Entertainment by the Smithsonian Institution.

[Continuing his 'GDC 25' archival research ahead of the 25th Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this February/March, official GDC historian Jason Scott debuts newly digitized audio from multiple years of the show, from an American McGee's Alice postmortem through the Messiah Engine and beyond.]

The UPS guy has started to build up a level of respect for me these days - I get that kind of glance that says somehow I've become one of his big dropoff stops, when it's supposed to all be simple one-box deliveries in a suburban neighborhood. I make it a point to always help unload the truck, which keeps me on his good side and not finding boxes dumped sideways at the end of the driveway or worse.

So when he showed up and I came out, all he had to do was look me in the eye and go "Fourteen".

Fourteen? Well, it appears that while in the process of moving some offices, my corporate masters had packed up every last scrap of material related to GDC, sealed all the boxes, and sent this pile of history off to the archive guy. So now I have all the cassettes, programs, documents, CD-ROMs and flyers for all of GDC's past from about 1996. Not bad. This is what some of it looks like. Some of it:

This is not the same as the first photo I put up a while ago - this is an entire other set of material. Formats include VHS, Betamax, Mini-DV, CD-ROM, Audio Cassette, Jaz Drive (shudder), and in one particularly interesting development, an entire hard drive with the year scrawled on it.

So this is the crossroads, or more accurately the threshold; from here it stops being a novelty to have material to digitize or an inbox with work left to do - from here it starts being a haul. The presentations also can't be cherry-picked like at the start; this is just simply all of them, all types, every subject that the GDC organizers thought needed to be spoken about in later half of the 1990s. It's about duty over fun now.

But that's a duty I think is worth taking on. So I've been going through the tapes I've already digitized, uploading them, and getting things together.

Frankly, this amount of material coming in has meant I've had to really step up the ingesting hardware. Here's what we have going on right now in that department:

Organizers of GDC 2011 are highlighting a first-ever public lecture from Cave Story creator Pixel, plus talks on Playdead's acclaimed Limbo and Chris Crawford on gaming's 'days of yore'.

As the overall session list for the February/March event expands further, following the announcement of the classic postmortems series and a keynote from Nintendo's Satoru Iwata, new lectures continue to be showcased.

These new talks are part of GDC 2011's Main Conference, which takes place at the Moscone Center from Wednesday March 2nd to Friday March 4th, 2011 during the pre-eminent, San Francisco-based event.

The GDC 2011 Main Conference features discipline-specific Tracks dedicated to programming, design, art, audio, business and management, and production.

These additions to the GDC 2011 roster, highlighted for the first time here, include the following lectures:

- In his first-ever public speech and Western appearance regarding much-beloved 2D indie title Cave Story, Japanese 'dojin' game developer Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya will discuss his creative process in making the PC freeware title that debuted in 2004.

The evocative retro-themed game -- a 2D platform adventure with genuine emotion, depth, and an intriguing story -- which took 5 years to complete, is an IGF finalist this year in its enhanced WiiWare version, and Amaya will talk about what went both right and wrong in creating a game that turned out completely unlike what he initially had in mind.

- Presenting a lecture called 'Designing Limbo's Puzzles', Playdead's lead gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen discusses design takeaways from the most-nominated game in this year's prestigious Game Developers Choice Awards.

Organizers of GDC 2011 have announced an affiliated two-day crash course for Scrum development on Feb 28th and March 1st, led by Clinton Keith, author of "Agile Game Development With Scrum."

Clinton Keith has over 15 years of experience in the industry, five of which have been spent applying Scrum to video game development. He has worked on titles including Midnight Club, Darkwatch, and Bourne Conspiracy.

GDC 2011 organizers have debuted the full Social & Online Games Summit line-up, including talks from Google on Google TV, plus major talks from leading firms like Playfish, Bigpoint, Zynga, and Playdom.

The popular multi-track summit, taking place on February 28th and March 1st during Game Developers Conference 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, presents a series of illuminating sessions about the technology, design, business, marketing, and future of social games.

The Summit description notes that "the features and tropes of connected gaming are catching on across the gaming landscape - encompassing Facebook gaming, web-based online games, downloadable persistent MMOs and beyond."

"New best practices are being discovered at a rapid pace, and we are seeing more high-quality entertainment experiences on social networks than ever before."

Advisors for this particular Summit include track co-chairs Raph Koster and Steve Meretzky from Playdom, as well as EA/Playfish's Sebastian De Halleux, Sulake's Sulka Haro, Making Fun's John Welch and more notables.

A number of major talks have been revealed on the Summit homepage and the GDC Education Summit section of GDC's Schedule Builder. Highlights include the following:

- In the 'Design' microtrack, notable talks include the always popular 'Social & Online Game Design 2010: A Year in Review' by Playmatics' Nick Fortugno and Joju Games' Juan Gril, as well as Raph Koster on 'social mechanics for social games'. Additional talks of interest in this area of the program include a postmortem of Kabam's popular Facebook title Kingdoms Of Camelot and a look back at the development of Riot Games' extremely popular 'DoTA'-style online game League Of Legends.

- The 'Vision' microtrack sees a lecture by Ian Ni-Lewis and Andres Ferrate of Google on "the lessons learned from developing Google's Smart TV platform, GoogleTV" with particular reference to game creators developing social titles for 'smart TVs', as well as a provocative debate, 'Are Social Games Legitimate?', as Nabeel Hyatt of Zynga and Curt Bererton of ZipZapPlay "go head to head" with Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Daniel James of Three Rings.

[Continuing his 'GDC 25' archival research ahead of the 25th Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this February/March, official GDC historian Jason Scott unearths and digitizes late '90s audio talks on the Chinese game market, adapting games, game engineering discipline and making casual games.]

There's quite a huge amount of historical Game Developers Conference audio and videotapes in my to-do pile, so it's been a case of knocking through them as fast as possible, to turn them from decaying analog recordings into longer-lifed digital ones. A few dozen are finished, with dozens more waiting.

When you have a historical archive of a bunch of presentations from such a fast-moving field as game development, it might seem to be a matter of dismissing these historical items as "out of date" and then waiting for the latest and greatest.

But there's something to be said for listening to well-assembled, clear sessions on aspects of game-making that still hold true. Here's a few issues that have been around for some time, and continue to be relevant.

In one notable audio talk we've digitized onto GDC Vault, William Dalton lays out a CGDC 1998 wake-up call that the development environment of games need to bring in the same qualities that software has had for years in other industries.

Entitled 'Bringing Engineering Discipline to Entertainment Development', and now available on GDC Vault, he describes what happens when these time-tested best practices are laid in front of the then-still-young computer game development culture. Listening to it, it might be interesting to compare to your own group's practices and see how many points you have already internalized, and how many have been cast aside.

Elsewhere, noted puzzle designer Scott Kim's 1997 CGDC talk now available on GDC Vault in audio, 'Games for the Rest of Us' has a really amazing delivery style. As he steps through the current state of the game-creation industry and the type of games that are appealing to a mass-market, he drops asides and wry observations that keep his audience engaged and chortling throughout.

The 2011 Game Developers Choice Awards, the peer-awarded highest honors in video game development, will honor Peter Molyneux, co-founder of Bullfrog Productions and founder of Lionhead Studios, with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the art and science of games.

Along the way, the organizers have also revealed the return of Tim Schafer, the LucasArts veteran and founder of Double Fine Productions (Brutal Legend), as host of the March 2nd ceremony during the 2011 Game Developers Conference, which is being streamed live online by GameSpot.com, this year's official GDCA media partner.

This news comes shortly following the announcement of this year's Choice Awards finalists, led by games including Limbo, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2.

As a passionate creator of video games for more than 25 years and counting, and one of the creators of the 'god game' genre, Peter Molyneux exemplifies the principles of the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award recognizes "the career and achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development and games as a whole."

While at Bullfrog Productions, which he co-founded in Guildford, England in 1987, Molyneux helped to create a string of seminal, innovative 'Britsoft' titles, including beloved games such as Theme Park, Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper.

His time at Bullfrog is particularly known for classic 'god game' progenitor Populous, which Molyneux will also be talking about as part of a special to-be-announced GDC 2011 lecture series.

After leaving Bullfrog Productions in 1997, when it was owned by Electronic Arts, Molyneux went on to form Lionhead Studios. The developer created notable PC franchises including Black & White before devising the acclaimed, choice-laden Fable RPG franchise and being acquired by Microsoft in 2006.

The Lifetime Achievement recipient is chosen by the elite Game Developers Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes game industry notables such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), Mark Cerny (Cerny Games), Harvey Smith (Arkane), Raph Koster (Metaplace), Julien Merceron (Square Enix), John Vechey (PopCap), and Clint Hocking (LucasArts).