It's another addition to the cabinet! At the end of last month, Remedy took home the Best Visual Art Award for Alan Wake 2 at the 24th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards 2024.
Accepting the award on behalf of the team was Kyle Rowley (Director on Alan Wake 2) and Thomas Puha (Communications Director at Remedy).
Stepping to the stage, Puha was first to talk, "Good evening. Congratulations to all the other nominees. Everybody did excellent work, but we're very happy to win. Accepting this on behalf of our esteemed, lovable Art Director, Janne Pulkkinen, and entire team back home, in Finland, and not just the art team but the entire dev team, everybody at Remedy. And of course the fabulous Northlight engine and tools team that enables us to put all those lovely pixels on the screen, so thank you for them as well. Kyle do you have some magical worlds?"
Encouraged to the microphone, Kyle joked, "No? Thank you? No, honestly the Remedy team is amazing. Janne Pulkkinen was mentioned, Anti Matti, we've done a lot of live action work in this game, and trying to find the visual identity, using liveaction and blending it inside the game engine was something that we really pushed hard on and Antti was a key part of that, so I just want to thank him too. And as Thomas said, the whole art team, Nazareno [Urbano] our lead environment artist, John [William Crossland] (lead character artist), Ron [Frölich] (lead hard surface artist) Damian [Dawid Stempniewski] (lead lightning artist), Johannes [Richter] (VFX Artist), all of the artists at Remedy. You're amazing. Love working with you. Thank you!"
But it was Puha that officially ended the speech with the tongue-in-cheek comment, "I'd also want to give a shoutout that everybody has had incredibly powerful acceptance and excellent speeches, so it had to end at some point, but thank you!"
Taking place in the middle of the Game Developer Conference, the awards describes itself as being "one of the premier accolades for peer recognition from around the world". Unlike its counterparts, nominations for the awards are free, allowing all titles to be considered regardless of financial success. The list is created by the International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), an invitation-only group which are formed of professional game developers.
Going into the ceremony, Remedy had been nominated for Best Visual Art, Best Technology, and Best Narrative, up against very tough competition. The team also received an Honorable Mention in the Game of the Year category.
Source: GDC
