The BAFTA Games Awards or British Academy Games Awards are an annual British awards ceremony honouring "outstanding creative achievement" in the video game industry. First presented in 2004 following the restructuring of the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards, the awards are presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).
The Game Developers Choice Awards are awards annually presented at the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games. Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999. Since then, the ceremony for the Independent Games Festival is held just prior to the Choice Awards ceremony.
Video game music is the soundtrack that accompanies video games. Early video game music was once limited to sounds of early sound chips, such as programmable sound generators (PSG) or FM synthesis chips. These limitations have led to the style of music known as chiptune, which became the sound of the first video games.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
Norihiko Hibino is a Japanese video game composer and saxophonist.
Ben Houge is an American composer and audio designer. He has worked on many projects, including composing music and designing audio for video games since 1996. He contributed to popular titles during his seven years of association with Sierra On-Line including developing audio for the Half-Life series and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. In 2003, Houge left Sierra to work as a freelance audio designer and later joined the video game corporation Ubisoft. Much of his work employs computers to make decisions and generate sound, and he has incorporated ideas from his experience in digital media into compositions for live performance. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.) in Music Theory from St. Olaf College and his Master of Music degree (M.M.) from the University of Washington and is currently an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music.
Chance Thomas is an American composer, author, and entrepreneur. As a composer, he creates original music for animation, video games, movies, television, and virtual reality. His music has received critical acclaim and commercial success, including an Oscar, an Emmy, and billions of dollars in sales worldwide.
Michael Reagan is an American composer, songwriter and music producer for film, television, and video games. His TV work includes The Powerpuff Girls, Chico Bon Bon: Monkey with a Tool Belt, and Bob Boyle's Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. His film work includes Any Given Sunday, Odnoklassniki.ru: naCLICKay udachu starring Snoop Dogg, the original song "Heart and Soul" for Ripple Effect featuring Asdru Sierra from Ozomatli, and the song "Take The First Step" for the Sony Pictures / Jim Henson Studios feature film Elmo in Grouchland, which won a Grammy Award for Best Children's Soundtrack. Reagan is the voice of the Tarzan yell in the 1999 Walt Disney Studios film Tarzan.
Nuendo is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music recording, arranging, editing and post-production. The package is aimed at audio and video post-production market segments, but also contains optional modules that can be used for multiple multimedia creation and audio sequencing.
David Sirlin is an American game designer and fighting game player.
Blindlight, LLC is a Los Angeles-based company providing Hollywood production services to the video game industry. Notable properties the company has contributed to include the Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Guild Wars, Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider, Destiny, and Halo series.
Richard Charles Boulanger is a composer, author, and electronic musician. He is a key figure in the development of the audio programming language Csound, and is associated with computer music pioneers Max Mathews and Barry Vercoe.
Penka Kouneva is a Bulgarian-American composer, orchestrator and soundtrack producer. In 1999, she began working in film and television and in 2009 began to score for videogames. Her music is a blend of Bulgarian influences, classical training, rock sensibility, and modern film and game soundtracks.
The External Development Summit (XDS) is a three-day event for the video game industry with its first edition held in 2013, and hosted annually in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The summit was established in order to share video game development best practices in the areas of 2D and 3D graphics, Animation, Software Engineering, Audio, Quality Assurance and Localization. Members of the XDS Advisory Committee are responsible for the design and delivery of the event.
Gordy Haab is an American film, video game and television composer based in Los Angeles, California. His work has been featured in works associated with franchises including most recently Star Wars Battlefront II, for which he won Video Game Score of the Year from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Haab is also known for his work on Microsoft's Halo Wars 2, for which he was nominated for a 2017 HMMA award. His score for Electronic Arts' Star Wars: Battlefront, won three awards at the 2016 GDC G.A.N.G. Awards: Music of the Year, Best Interactive Score, and Best Instrumental Score. Gordy has also been nominated for a BAFTA Games Awards for his work on 'Star Wars: Battlefront.'
Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound is a 2016 Canadian documentary film written and directed by Karen Collins, who, according to Dana Plank on the Journal of the Society for American Music, has published "some of the most influential texts on the history of game audio." The documentary examines the history of game sound design from penny arcades, pinball and video games up to 2015. The documentary was founded through Kickstarter, and features interviews with people involved in game sound design, such as: Marty O'Donnell, Nathan McCree, George Sanger, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura and Winifred Phillips among others.
Hexany Audio is an audio post-production studio based in the Greater Los Angeles area. It provides custom sound, original music, voice over, audio programming, and sound branding for video games, virtual reality (VR) and interactive media.
The Game Audio Network Guild Awards is an award show that celebrates excellence in video game audio. The awards, which started in 2004, are arranged by the Game Audio Network Guild and held annually during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The first four shows were held at the Fairmont San Jose, before moving to the Moscone Center from the fifth; due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 18th, 19th, and 20th ceremonies were held virtually.
Amie Doherty is an Irish composer and orchestrator for film and television. She is the first woman to score an animated feature for DreamWorks.
Johanna Pirker is an Austrian computer scientist, educator, and game designer at Graz University of Technology with a focus on games research, virtual reality and data science. Pirker was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list in the category Science & Healthcare (2018) for her efforts in improving digital education with virtual reality environments and games. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Her dissertation was supervised by the Austrian e-learning expert Christian Gütl and MIT professor of physics John Winston Belcher. She is involved in various efforts to educate about the potential of video games. This also includes efforts to advocate the background and cultural aspect of video games. In 2020 she received the Käthe-Leichter Prize for her efforts for her initiatives in the field of diversity in engineering and in the games industry. In 2021 she received the Hedy Lamarr Prize.
