The editors of Think Services' Game Developer magazine have named the winners for the 2008 Front Line Awards, the magazine's eleventh annual evaluation of the year's best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books. In addition, the magazine has revealed that the Unreal Engine series, Epic Games' popular multi-platform game engine, is this year's inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame. Each year, honor is bestowed upon a product that has made an outstanding contribution to the game development industry for five years or more. All winners will be profiled in the January 2009 issue of Game Developer, available to subscribers in early January.
The Front Line Award winners represent the most innovative, user-friendly, and useful products from behind the scenes of the world's best video games. The complete list of winners of the 2008 Game Developer Front Line Awards is as follows:
Hall of Fame:
Unreal Engine
Epic Games
Art Tool:
Photoshop CS3
Adobe
Audio Tool:
FMOD
Firelight Technologies Pty, Ltd
Middleware:
Havok Physics
Havok
Engine:
Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.7.1
GarageGames
Programming Tool:
Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft
Book:
The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell
Elsevier
Game Developer's mission for more than fifteen years has been to provide game developers with information, news, and articles that pertain directly to them. The Front Line Awards are an official way of recognizing one specific aspect of the industry: the tools that developers need to do their jobs better.
Each year, Game Developer looks at the powerful lineup of new products and new releases of favorite tools for professional game developers - from game engines to books. Following consultation with the magazine's editors, finalists were selected based on criteria such as utility, innovation, value, and ease of use, and professional developers were also surveyed to decide this year's ultimate nominees. For the first time, both Game Developer magazine subscribers and Gamasutra.com community members were then polled to ultimately decide the best game development-related products this year.
"These awards show developers' appreciation for tools by companies of all sizes, provided they're useful and well-supported," said Brandon Sheffield, editor-in-chief of Game Developer. "Congratulations to both the winners and the finalists, and good luck for next year."
For more information, please visit Game Developer online at http://www.gdmag.com/.
