Wednesday, January 28, 2009 -- Havok™, the Emmy award winning Irish company which provides interactive software and services to digital creators in the global games and movie industries, has won a prestigious Game Developer Front Line Award for their industry leading middleware product Havok Physics.
US based magazine Game Developer is the leading publication for the worldwide gaming industry and their annual Front Line Awards acknowledge technology companies and products which drive innovation and efficiency in creating state-of-the-art gameplay. Winning a Front Line Award is a significant accolade, as winners are chosen by their peers in the global game developer community.
Havok Physics was chosen as the winning entry in the “Middleware” of the Front Line Awards category by a panel of professional game developers from the industry’s top studios. Entries are nominated by members of the game development community and readers of Game Developer magazine and are judged on a number of criteria, including ease of implementation and integration, value and contribution to delivering innovative gameplay.
In a review of 2009’s Front Line Award winners published on Game Developer’s Gamasutra website, the largest game developer website worldwide, Sega Studios’ Jeremy Gordon and Michael Boccieri praised Havok’s high standards of customer service:
“What sets Havok apart are the layers of developer support that the company has integrated into all aspects of its product and services. Havok understands what it means to be a middleware company and what it means for middleware to bring real value to a game's development cycle.
Real value is a company that delivers a solid middleware solution and continues to update it with developer-requested features. It's a mindset of getting to know your clients' products and their product goals, and aligning middleware roadmaps toward providing them with their most-important features wherever possible.
It is this real value that Havok Physics brings to developers with its bottom-up methodology, an optimized and integrated codebase, and dedication to supporting the creation of more believable virtual worlds. It stands out among some tough competition as winner of this year's Front Line Award for Middleware.”
David O’Meara, Managing Director of Havok, says winning a Game Developer Front Line Award is a fantastic accolade for the company:
“At Havok, we are proud of our deep understanding of our clients’ ambitions and our products are developed with customer satisfaction in mind. We offer the highest levels of developer support and our physics engines have gained industry wide praise for easy code integration, innovation and ease of implementation. The Front Line Awards are of particular significance as it is our existing and potential customers sitting on the judging panel, once more acknowledging Havok’s unparalleled record of customer satisfaction. There is no other Irish company receiving such high levels of praise from industry leaders and Havok is again putting Ireland on the map as a world class successful Irish technology company.”
Havok works in partnership with the world’s best known game developers including Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Pandemic Studios and their technology is available across all platforms including Playstation 3, Playstation 2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo WII and the PC.
Many of the world’s best selling games use the Havok physics engine including Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Spore, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Guitar Hero III.
Havok won an Emmy award from the US National Academy of Television, Arts & Sciences Award at a glittering ceremony in Las Vegas last year. The company was honoured with the award for their work on pioneering physics engines, which makes games more realistic than ever before.
Read Sega Studios’ Jeremy Gordon and Michael Boccieri’s review of Havok Physics on the Gamasutra website:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3898/game_developers_front_line_awards_.php?page=5
For full details of Game Developer’s Front Line Awards 2009 visit:
http://www.gdmag.com/frontlineawards/homepage.htm
