February 21st, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Game Awards | No Comments »

Following the awards party of the International Mobile Game Awards, the jury has honoured several mobile game developers and publishers for their creative and innovative contributions.

The big winner of the show was FastFoot Challenge from the German developer Urban Team. They where awarded with the “Best Real World Game” award.

The excellence in Gameplay award went to EDGE, a mobile game from Mobigame in France. Real Racer of Firemint from Australia won the Excellence in Connectivity Award, Secret Exit from Finland walked away with the Excellence in 3D Award for their title Zen Bound and Tropical Towers from Real Arcade (Finland) was awarded as the Best Casual Game.

The People’s Choice Award, chosen via on-line voting on www.imgawards.com went to Digital Legends from Spain with the title KROLL and a panel of Mobile Operators, representing Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile, selected EDGE of Mobigame from France who therefore received the Operators’ Choice Award.

The Jury decided that all this year's winning Category entries were of such a high standard that they all merited a Grand Prix. In addition, the exceptional innovation displayed in Kodo Evolved deserved an Innovation Award. As a result, this year the Jury has decided that the Grand Prix will be divided equally between the five Category winners and the winner of the Innovation Award.

Mark Ollila, Head of Games Publishing at Nokia commented: “This year there has seen many exciting nominees for the IMG Awards in each category, offering groundbreaking ideas and cutting edge concepts to mobile gaming. The high standard of entries demonstrates the quality of innovation in the industry at the moment, and is indicative that 2009 will be a great year for mobile game developers and players alike.”

“ARM is proud to support the IMGA in the drive for ever more advanced, innovative and creative content for handsets, maximizing the end-user experience and making the most of technologies such as the market leading, scalable ARM Mali GPU architecture,” said Borgar Ljosland, director of advanced product marketing, ARM Media Processing Division.”Game developers are really raising the bar to bring truly visually compelling content to mobile phones and the award entries show the kind of quality that is emerging.”

Marc Naddell, Vice President, Partner & Developer Programs, NAVTEQ said: “NAVTEQ Network for Developers is committed to working with developers to drive innovation in the LBS space and is following the evolution of location-enabled games with especially keen interest. It amazes me how game developers are able to fuse technology and creativity to produce fun games. This year’s IMGA has proven that location-aware games are clearly making the map to the future of mobile gaming more interactive and more fun.”

Guy Teissier Chairman of Marseille Eurom