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First tickets for onGameStart contest winners

As usual when I publish the list of the winners I just want to edit my original post with the contest, but this time I’ll make an exception. All because of the one answer that just get beyond my “amaze me” statement. It’s just a pure essence of the contest and the idea behind the conference.

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So, there was three tickets to give away, and I really didn’t have any doubts about this one: the first ticket goes to Zofia Korcz - congratulations! What she did that it’s the number one entry from all the others you ask? Well, she took the HTML5 game dev tutorial and implemented a whole working level of Sokoban with the messages (in CSS3 speech bubbles!) throughout the whole gameplay where she explained why Sokoban was her favourite game from her childhood. Now that’s a little something something when you compare it to “just” writing a few words. We were so excited about this entry that Michał, onGameStart organizer, offered her not only the ticket for the conference, but also one ticket to the workshops of her choosing that’ll gonna be held before the main event!

We have to reward that kind of dedication and commitment, right? You can of course check this HTML5 level of Sokoban out and read her story. The second ticket goes to Rico Possienka who said that Mega Man 4 was the best game from his childhood. Here you can read the best (as I think of it) part from his entry, which is a nice point of view when you think about “the best games ever”:

”(…) I realized that, when people consider a game a classic it is often more a matter of nostalgia. I think Super Mario Bros for the old Nintendo for example is considered by some as the holy grail of videogaming because most modern gamers learned how to play thanks to that title. Of course I am not denying that this games introduced key concepts which were new in videogame history at that time. Nevertheless I am very sure that in 20 something years people will argue that Halo was from a time where videogames were still videogames while the current games (Final Fantasy XXXV-2, Street Fighter IIX Turbo Alpha Plus Hyper Champion Edition and the first DLC pack for Duke Nukem Forever) will be considered crap. As a gamedeveloper you have to learn that things change and you shouldn’t fear these changes. Online functionality changed the way we play games and Steam changed the way we can access them. With HTML5 and modern browsers even the platform becomes insignificant and games will be distributed in a way which doesn’t requires a physical copy anymore. A lot of people see the way videogames get distributed today as a thread. First day DLC is one of those concerns. Not having a physical copy of the game and moving the distribution completely to the cloud can also be seen as a great danger for the autonomy of the gamer. But it can also lead to a new experience of how we play games with a higher flexibility and social activity. As HTML5 gamedeveloper we have to make sure that this new technology will only used for the greater good of the gamer. I am excited to be a part of this development and to help creating a new gaming experience for the upcoming generation.”

The last ticket goes to Ian Mays for the story about EverQuest:

”(…) I played EQ from around the age of 14 to 17 with a lot of my real-life friends, I used to battle a 300ms (at best) latency and a free 1 hour cut-off 56k modem connection to play all night with people from the states - sometimes i wouldn’t even achieve anything - it was just to be part of some 12 hour long 40 player raid to the ‘Plane of Hate’ for some loot I’d never get awarded by my guild anyways! The economy was incredible (almost emulating real life), I could sit for hours trading before even going out to kill something. With Everquest you felt you were actually achieving something by playing (normally bragging rights of some sort), I’ve not had a similar experience since with any game - it was so difficult that a level up could take a month to achieve depending on how much play time you could muster up to play each night and whether you could get a group together in that time.”

So the list of our winners looks like this:

  • Zofia Korcz
  • Rico Possienka
  • Ian Mays

Congratulations! Thanks to everybody who participated, all of the sent entries was great and it was really hard to pick the last two winners. I hope I can organize more contests in the future, so stay in touch!