Dust: An Elysian Tail wins Dream Build Play 2009:
This year’s global Dream.Build.Play competition garnered more than 350 games from over 100 countries, nearly doubling the number of community members who enrolled in and submitted Dream.Build.Play titles from those in last year’s competition. Many of these creators have the opportunity to appear on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games Channel.
Dean Dodrill of the United States earned the grand prize of $40,000 for “Dust: An Elysian Tail” a side-scrolling, action role-playing game in which the player controls Dust, a man searching for himself. Set in the beautiful yet mysterious world of Falana, this game chronicles Dust’s journey to liberate an oppressed village and rediscover his past. Meticulously hand-animated and painted, “Dust: An Elysian Tail” welcomes exploration, action, and above all else, mastery of a fighting system that rewards skilled gamers.
Panya Inversin and his team from the United States took home second place and $20,000 for their stunning 3-D, four-player brawler/space-shooter, “Max Blastronaut”.
Nivel21 Entertainment, led by Mauricio Garcia from Spain, received third place and $10,000 for the challenging puzzle game “Rotor’scope – The Secret of the Endless Energy”.
China’s Hu Ling and his team came in fourth place and received $5,000 for the stylish martial arts action game “HurricaneX2 Evolution”.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
