Silicon Minds contest winners announced
Some amateur developers could get internships at Rare next Summer
At last a little break in between GoldenEye XBLA news to inform about the recently announced winners of the Silicon Minds contest supported by Microsoft XNA, Lionhead Studios and Rare Ltd.
And since the very own Microsoft press release summarizes what was all about in only a a couple of sentences, let’s just quote it without further ado: “Contestants had only 7 weeks to create their game using innovative AI and the competition received broad international interest with over 600 registered participants and 31 valid submissions. Overall, the organisers of the competition were very impressed with the quality of submissions.”
And who were the winning genius that dared to accepted such an epic challenge before shuting themselves away in their rooms for a month and a half? Quick! The list:
- Nicholas Barratt and Gillian Allen, creators of Conquerator
- Nancy McCourt and Alexandre Coutur, creators of Hive
- Markus Jost and Remo Zehnder, creators of iSheep
- John Montemorano, creator of Orblast
- Brent Strandy, creator of Specimen
Lead software engineer for Perfect Dark Zero, Kieran Connell, expressed his astonishment after realizing “what many of the contestants managed to achieve in such a short space of time.” He didn’t hesitate to exclaim how “inspiring for professional game developers like ourselves” was “to see the passion and talents of a future generation of programmers demonstrated in such a unique and exciting way through this competition.” Moreover, on the possibility of recruiting them as interns at Rare Ltd, he added that “Artificial intelligence is such a key component of creating fun and enjoyable games so we were more than happy to extend the offer of interviews for internships here at Rare to the winners so they may get the chance to see how these ideas and techniques are applied in a big studio environment.”
Apart from being granted with the chance to show their winning projects at the recent Game Developers Conference 2008, the five contestants were awarded with a $3000 prize, a one-year subscription to the XNA Creators Club and -as Connell pointed out- “the opportunity to interview for a three month internship at the Microsoft Research Cambridge lab, UK and/or at one of the Microsoft game studios Rare Ltd or Lionhead Studios (from Summer 2008)”.
Check out the winning entries at the Dream Build Play 2008 website.
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