Alec Holowka
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Alec Holowka
Alec Holowka (30 October 1983 – 31 August 2019) was a Canadian indie game developer and co-founder of independent game companies Infinite Ammo, Infinite Fall, and Bit Blot. He was mainly known for the award-winning titles ''Night in the Woods'' and ''Aquaria''. Life and career Holowka was introduced to programming at the age of eight when his father bought him the book ''Basic Fun''. Eventually he began working with a freeware group called ''Zaphire Productions''. He then worked for a number of failed startups, including one in Winnipeg working on a PC multiplayer fantasy action title and a combat racer in Vancouver for the Xbox 360. Holowka acted as sound engineer on the 2006 freeware title ''I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator'' as a response to American lawyer Jack Thompson's "A Modest Video Game Proposal". Holowka met Derek Yu in the comments section of popular technology website Slashdot in a post regarding Jack Thompson's proposal and along with Chris Hanson and Phil Jone ...
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Bit Blot
''Aquaria'' is a side-scrolling action-adventure game designed by Alec Holowka and Derek Yu, who published the game in 2007 as the independent game company Bit Blot. The game follows Naija, an aquatic humanoid woman, as she explores the underwater world of Aquaria. Along her journey, she learns about the history of the world she inhabits as well as her own past. The gameplay focuses on a combination of swimming, singing, and combat, through which Naija can interact with the world. Her songs can move items, affect plants and animals, and change her physical appearance into other forms that have different abilities, like firing projectiles at hostile creatures, or passing through barriers inaccessible to her in her natural form. After more than two years of development, the game was released in late 2007 for Windows. A port of the game to Mac OS X was released in 2008 by Ambrosia Software, and an updated version of the game was released on the Steam service that same year. A Linu ...
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Aquaria (video Game)
''Aquaria'' is a side-scrolling action-adventure game designed by Alec Holowka and Derek Yu, who published the game in 2007 as the independent game company Bit Blot. The game follows Naija, an aquatic humanoid woman, as she explores the underwater world of Aquaria. Along her journey, she learns about the history of the world she inhabits as well as her own past. The gameplay focuses on a combination of swimming, singing, and combat, through which Naija can interact with the world. Her songs can move items, affect plants and animals, and change her physical appearance into other forms that have different abilities, like firing projectiles at hostile creatures, or passing through barriers inaccessible to her in her natural form. After more than two years of development, the game was released in late 2007 for Windows. A port of the game to Mac OS X was released in 2008 by Ambrosia Software, and an updated version of the game was released on the Steam service that same year. A Lin ...
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Independent Games Festival
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media,About the IGF
, www.IGF.com.
later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition. The IGF competition awards a total of $50,000 in prizes to independent developers in Main Competition and Student Competition categories, and held around the same time as the Game Developers Choice Awards event. From 2007 to 2010 there was a separate event called IGF Mobile for mobile phone games.


Competition Structure

The festival awards ceremony is split into two broad categories: the main IGF competition and the IG ...
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Polygon (website)
''Polygon'' is an American entertainment website that publishes blogs, reviews, guides, videos, and news primarily covering video games, as well as movies, comics, television and books. At its October 2012 launch as Vox Media's third property, ''Polygon'' sought to distinguish itself from competitors by focusing on the stories of the people behind the games instead of the games themselves. It also produced long-form magazine-style feature articles, invested in video content, and chose to let their review scores be updated as the game changed. The site was built over the course of ten months, and its 16-person founding staff included the editors-in-chief of the gaming sites ''Joystiq'', '' Kotaku'' and '' The Escapist''. Its design was built to HTML5 responsive standards with a pink color scheme, and its advertisements focused on direct sponsorship of specific kinds of content. Vox Media produced a documentary series on the founding of the site. History The gaming blog ''Poly ...
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MobyGames
MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video games and the people and companies behind them via crowdsourcing. This includes nearly 300,000 games for hundreds of platforms. The site is supported by banner ads and a small number of people paying to become patrons. Founded in 1999, ownership of the site has changed hands several times. It is currently owned by Atari SA. Content Prior to being merged into the database, changes go through a leisurely verification process by volunteer "approvers". There is a published standard for game information and copyediting. The most commonly used sources are video game packaging and title and credit screens. Registered users can rate and review any game. Users can create private or public "have" and "want" lists which can generate a list of games available for trade with other users. The site has an integrated forum. Each listed game can have its own subforum. History MobyGames was founded on March 1, 1999 by Jim Le ...
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The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal ...
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AXS (company)
AXS (pronounced access) is an American Primary ticket outlet, ticket outlet for sports and entertainment events, founded in 2011 and owned by Anschutz Entertainment Group, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), the world's second largest Promoter (entertainment), entertainment promoter behind Live Nation Entertainment. AEG operate venues globally, as well as promote events under their AEG Presents banner, meaning these venues and promoted events typically use AXS as their primary ticket outlet. Background The initial AXS deployment was August 2011 and venues and services have been added in a phased roll out. As of August 2013, AXS was the exclusive or primary ticket provider for over 30 US venues and 9 UK venues. The first Staples Center concert available only through AXS was Beyoncé in 2013; both Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers are still using Ticketmaster. The white-label product, white label technology Outbox developed enables AEG to sell tickets under either t ...
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TowerFall Ascension
''TowerFall'' is an action indie video game created by Maddy Thorson through her company Matt Makes Games. In the game, players control up to four archers in a multiplayer platform fighter. It was released on the Ouya microconsole in June 2013 and was later ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux, OS X, and Windows as ''TowerFall Ascension'' and to the Nintendo Switch under its original title of ''TowerFall''. ''TowerFall'' was Thorson's first commercial game. It followed from a June 2012 game jam single-player prototype. Thorson tested the game on her indie developer colleagues with whom she lived, and developed its capacity as a party game. Its mechanics were inspired by games of Thorson's youth, such as '' Bushido Blade'' and '' GoldenEye 007'', and influenced by demo feedback at the Evolution Championship Series fighting game tournament. ''TowerFall'' was known as the standout title for the Ouya at the console's launch. In its first year, the game sold around 7,000 copies ...
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Engadget
''Engadget'' ( ) is a multilingual technology blog network with daily coverage of gadgets and consumer electronics. ''Engadget'' manages ten blogs four of which are written in English and six have international versions with independent editorial staff. It has been operated by Yahoo since September 2021. History ''Engadget'' was founded by former '' Gizmodo'' technology weblog editor and co-founder Peter Rojas. ''Engadget'' was the largest blog in Weblogs, Inc., a blog network with over 75 weblogs, including ''Autoblog'' and ''Joystiq,'' which formerly included ''Hackaday''. Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL in 2005. Launched in March 2004, ''Engadget'' is updated multiple times a day with articles on gadgets and consumer electronics. It also posts rumors about the technological world, frequently offers opinion within its stories, and produces the weekly Engadget Podcast that covers tech and gadget news stories that happened during the week. On December 30, 2009, ''Engadget' ...
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NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's various operations report to the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim. The NBCUniversal News Group also comprises MSNBC, the network's 24-hour general news channel, business and consumer news channels CNBC and CNBC World, the Spanish language Noticias Telemundo and United Kingdom–based Sky News. NBC News aired the first regularly scheduled news program in American broadcast television history on February 21, 1940. The group's broadcasts are produced and aired from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBCUniversal's headquarters in New York City. The division presides over America's number-one-rated newscast, ''NBC Nightly News'', the world's first of its genre morning television program, ''Today'', and the longest-running television series in American ...
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Crayon Physics Deluxe
''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' is a puzzle video game designed by Petri Purho and released on January 7, 2009. An early version, titled ''Crayon Physics'', was released for Windows in June 2007. ''Deluxe'' won the grand prize at the Independent Games Festival in 2008. It features a heavy emphasis on two-dimensional physics simulations, including gravity, mass, kinetic energy and transfer of momentum. The game includes a level editor and enables its players to download and share custom content via an online service. Gameplay The objective of each level in ''Crayon Physics Deluxe'' is to guide a ball from a predetermined start point so that it touches all of the stars placed on the level. The ball and nearly all objects on the screen are affected by gravity. The player cannot control the ball directly, but rather must influence the ball's movement by drawing physical objects on the screen. Depending on how the object is drawn, it becomes a rigid surface, a pivot point, a wheel or a ro ...
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Shacknews
''Shacknews'' (originally Quakeholio, then ShugaShack) is a website that hosts news, features, editorial content and forums relating to computer games and Video game console, console games. It is currently owned by a company called Gamerhub Content Network. Gamerhub Content Network purchased the site in January 2014. History ''Shacknews'' was founded in 1996 by Steve "Scary" Gibson, 20 years old at the time, as a website dedicated to following news about the then-upcoming game ''Quake (video game), Quake'' from id Software. The original name of the website was "''Quakeholio''". Through the years the website evolved to cover more than just Quake and the name was changed. "''Shugashack''" was chosen after a discussion with friends about the general direction of the page and content. After a few years of frequent spelling confusion and interpreting the name as that of a Pornography, pornographic website, the site was renamed "''Shacknews''". ''FileShack'', a site for game demos, pa ...
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