The Independent Game Festival (IGF) was created by the producers of the online and print magazine Gamasutra in 1998. Taking its cue from the Sundance Film Festival and its influence on Hollywood, the IGF was established to promote game development by small developers, students, and anyone outside the mainstream who is interested in creating games.
The IGF offers prizes for game developers in seven major categories:
- Seumas McNally Grand Prize (US$20,000)
- Innovation In Visual Art (US$2,500)
- Innovation In Audio (US$2,500)
- Innovation In Game Design (US$2,500)
- Technical Excellence (US$2,500)
- Best Web Browser Game (US$2,500)
- Audience Award (US$2,500)
The winner of the grand prize was a game called Darwinia, by independent developer Introversion Software. Darwinia takes place in a fictional "supercomputer" which is running a world simulation where small humanoid icons called "Darwinians" are created and battle each other across a stylized polygonal landscape. The setting of Darwinia evokes fond memories of movies like T.R.O.N. (indeed, the Engineer unit looks very much like the flying constructor robots in that film) but the game has nods to all sorts of movies, TV shows, and old computer games. The Darwinians look curiously like the main character in Lode Runner, for example, and fleets of Space Invaders occasionally rain death from above.
The gameplay is similar to other real-time strategy games, but has enough depth to stand out from the crowd of Command and Conquer clones. In some ways it is reminiscent of the game Pikmin, as the player must lead armies of Darwinians by controlling officers and other key units.
Other winners included Number None's innovative time-manipulation puzzle title Braid, which won out for Innovation In Game Design, and Digital Eel's "short-game" space exploration title Weird Worlds: Return.
For the first time, game mods were eligible for their own awards. The cyberpunk title Dystopia won for best Half-Life 2 mod, while the ancient Chinese action title Path Of Vengeance was victorious for best Unreal Tournament 2004 mod. Meanwhile, the console-RPG style title Rose Of Eternity - Chapter 1 beat out its competitors for Best Neverwinter Nights mod, and Last Man Standing Co-Op won for best Doom 3 mod.
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